Rosemary Winslow
Department of English, The Catholic University of America
–Suddenly
his eyes would become blank, nothing but two open wounds, two pits of terror.
--Elie
Wiesel (Night, p. 72)
–A metaphor gives us at least a fighting chance of saying something real.
–Alicia
Ostriker (“Dancing at the Devil’s Party,” p. 208)
– . . . metaphor is one of the chief agents of our moral nature . . . the
more serious we are in life, the less we can do without it.
--Cynthia
Ozick (Metaphor and Memory, p. 270)
In
the past two years, interest in studying and teaching writings about terror and
trauma have markedly increased, especially and understandably first-person
accounts of events that affected large numbers of people. As one century that
has often been called “the century of trauma” passes into another like it,
but compounded so far by the fear that it may also be a century of terror, it is
important to read and understand what these accounts have to tell us. Much
recent research on personal accounts of traumatic events has focused on
narrative and ethos, (e.g., Carruth, Langer, Rosenwald, DeVinne, Bernard-Donals
and Glejzer, Hayes). Little has been said about the stylistic aspects despite
the highly tropological nature of trauma writings, which depend on tropes to
indicate the profound psychological and moral depths of traumatic experience
their writers are determined to tell. Lawrence Langer, one of the leading
researchers of Jewish Holocaust narratives, has denounced the presence of
figural language in survivor narratives, believing that it detracts from the
reality of the events that happened. Cathy Carruth has made the necessary
distinction between narrative and event; she separates objective events from
subjective experience and finds the event pressures the narrative as gaps, which
are the evidence of traumatic events and which cannot be recovered because the
experiencer is not fully conscious during the event. What we have, she says, is
a fragmented world which cannot be pieced together from personal accounts. At
issue in both is the aim of recovering “what happened” in the
“objective” world, meaning the physical, social, and political contexts
external to the individual, so that the historian is able to construct her own
version of events. Michael Bernard-Donals has taken up Carruth’s
deconstructive gaps to argue that ethos may be indicated by the gaps. He argues
that in traumatic narratives the writer must be judged as credible on the fact of experience though not on the facts themselves on the
basis of the gaps’ existence.
It
seems odd that such tropological approaches constitute the methodology for
determining veracity and meaning of events, but not for understanding the story–the
writer’s constructed perspective on the events. Since the publication of
Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, historiography has been seen as tropological,
as the historian employs tropological processes in researching and using
evidence for abstract claims and generalizing concepts. Metonymic process is
necessary to abstracting meaning from events while metaphor is necessary to
holding abstraction in tension to retain some measure of particularity through
difference. Metonymy threatens erasure of the individual and disempowered social
groups through their collapsing fragments of the whole event, and metaphor
threatens to overwhelm making meaning at all with its wealth of difference.1
Yet, the authors of personal experience narratives are not seen as having the
same difficulties of metonymic reduction and metaphoric distinction, or of
having to resort to the same problematic solutions of decision and tension. Even
more, the figural language inside the text is likely to be read wholly off
cultural concept metaphors, as are analyses of terror.2 Shouldn’t
we read the texts on–and in–their
own terms, at least from some purposes, for example, to learn what their
authors, who know intimately the extremes of the human condition, have to say?
Shouldn’t we try to read the texts as fully as possible? If we don’t try, I
think our failure renders the writer faceless as an experiencer of trauma, when
we turn away from the full and particular sense of the indicators she has set
before us. Although a traumatic event may happen to large groups of people, it
always happens to each person–to each body, mind, and spirit.
It is felt and thought in individuals, in each body and mind, even if
many are physically together. And that feeling and thought, hers,
are what personal experience accounts attempt to set down in a communicable way.
To understand trauma narratives, then, we have to look inside, not just for
facts of events but for the language that binds meaning and significance to
them.We have to read their language more fully than we are used to doing.
To
read trauma narratives as having “gaps,” as mere metonymic displacement of
fragments of events and fragmentation of the everyday world–as unfortunate
interference (Langer) or unfortunate
absence (Carruth)--is to ignore both the aims of the genre and tropical language
that is in the so-called gaps. It is
to ignore the language, and thus the experience the writer is deeply intent on
conveying. Events may look fragmented and experience of them may look fragmented
from the perspective of the everyday world, but to an experience, it is a whole
world, and while in the experience, it is the real world, the one that counts.
It is thus a separate world, because
it is outside everyday experience and thus outside ordinary language, which
developed in and from the everyday, ordinary, consensual world to give meaning
to everyday reality. What appears to the reader when reading through eyes
reading from an ordinary language perspective is a fragmented world; what is
there is the traumatic world; and its speakability is hampered by the nature of
the experience’s and the experiencer’s outsidedness, and by the necessary
reliance on tropical language that is not conceptual,
that is, not of the everyday ordinary
world and language shared by readers. To speak and to read the world next
to the ordinary world requires using the kinds of tropes capable of
indicating (pointing to, gesturing toward) the experience. Knowledge-making in
trauma results from a metonymic displacement (not fragmentation) of
the already-available ordinary world and its language, which fails in its
ordering when faced with trauma. This move shifts the experiencer to
preconceptual figural resources. And because the everyday ordinary world and its
concepts are rendered meaningless in the total shift outside of it, another
world is created that is discontinuous: the trauma world is thus made through a
metaphoric process. It exists outside of the ordinary–side-by-side.
Bernard-Donals
recognizes the side-by-sideness when he asserts,” the origin of testimony
itself . . . [is] another reality,” and the origin, the event itself, as
unrecoverable as its objective fact from the narrative (572). He proposes a view
of ethos as indicative, by which he means a view that regards ethos as credible,
or “telling the truth,” if the writer is able, through language, not on
external grounds, “to move an audience to ‘see’ an issue or an event that
exceeds language’s ability to narrate it” (566). I want to propose that the
world induced by traumatic experience is itself indicative, for it lives in
preconceptual figuration, beyond language, and to “see” its truth, we need
imaging strategies that move us into its world; otherwise we cannot
“see”–grasp its language-exceeding truth. These strategies have
traditionally been associated with reading poetry, where we are schooled to
build up a sense of a individual’s world from the figural resources that
create it.
How
do we read the figuration of these texts to make sense of their worlds? If the
trauma world is a world radically different from the everyday world, how do we
know it if do not have the conceptual store that enables language to give
meaning to experience? If an experience is unspeakable, is it also unthinkable?
The answer is no. Primo Levi expressed the difficulty this way, encountered the
first morning in Auschwitz: “for the first time we became aware that our
language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man” (Survival
in Auschwitz 26). While the facts detailed in his narrative say what
happened, it is the figurative language indicates what the facts meant in the
situation, how they all contributed to the “demolition of a man.” A man. An individual human being. Hayden White’s concern that
scientific historiography tells “only part of the story of human beings at
grips with their individual and collective destinies” (145, 46) has become a
central problem not only for historians, but for rhetoric and composition
studies. How we read figuration of individuals’ accounts is basic to
gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data; to miss it or to misread is to mistake
the data. With accounts of traumatic
experience, this is even more true. In the absence of already-made language,
figuration has to build the sense of the experience, its feel and meaning of the
destruction of the human. But more, the figures are the only language with which
the experiencer can think of the
experience.
In Metaphoric
Worlds, Samuel R. Levin proposes a kind of metaphor he terms “conceiving
of,” in contrast to “conceiving” it. “To think of,” he suggests, is very different from “to think” a world.
In the first, the world is thought in its fullness and meaningfullness; in the second, the world is thought in conceptual terms.
It is the first strategy we have not used, but need to use to engage with trauma
worlds. It is the second that most directly conveys reading to the reader, but
which also can be the significant source of misreading. The first asks us to try
to “think of” the world in its own terms and existence. The second easily
overlooks and unwittingly erases the world and the experiencer’s identity as
experiencer and speaker of unspeakable truth.
But
before taking a detailed look at Levin’s ideas, it is necessary to have a
clearer idea of
what
trauma is and how the experiencer of trauma thinks of and attempts to present
it.
What is trauma? How
is traumatic experience?
–As
always when I saw their faces I froze from terror and hatred.
--Primo
Levi (Survival at Auschwitz, p. 159)
–The
different emotions that overcame us, of resignation, of futile rebellion, of
religious abandon, of fear, of despair, now joined together after a sleepless
night in a collective, uncontrolled panic.
The time for meditation, the time for decision was over, and all reason
dissolved into a tumult. . . .
--Primo
Levi, (Survival at Auschwitz, p. 16.)
–I could feel myself as two entities–my body and me.
I hated it.
–Elie
Wiesel (Night, p. 81)
Trauma
induces extreme physical and psychological states, which arise from a body and
mind that knows itself to be in the grip of an annihilating threat to a whole or
part. Overwhelmed and unable to escape, the experiencer’s ordinary world is
severely disrupted, rendering the making of meaning of the event while in it
impossible. In addition, the experience is not of
the ordinary world of everyday experience and meaning, and it cannot be made to
reconcile (be organized within, ordered, made meaningful) with it. But the
situation is more complicated still; changes in physical and psychological
states shift the experiencer into an altered state of consciousness
characterized by heightened imaging and interference with reasoning. As
traumatic experience is a physiological/ psychological phenomenon much studied
in the discipline of psychology, I will let Barry M. Cohen, trauma researcher
and therapist, define and summarize:
Spiegel
(1992) defines trauma as a “sudden discontinuity in physical and psychological
experience” in which the discontinuity is both a defense by the victim against
the traumatic input (flight from harm), as well as a reflection of it (schema
shifts and dissociation). . . . The victim shifts consciousness in order to
avoid pain, separates any previous positive connection with the perpetrator from
awareness, and becomes a thing instead of a person . . . . This moment of
disparity and despair facilitates a hypnoid or trance state in the victim which
fosters the creation of arational, atemporal, and nonlinear constructs
(Horowitz, 1070). The response to this state of overwhelming experience has been
described as “speechless terror”, since information can neither be fully
assimilated nor accommodated (van der Kolk & van der Hart, 1991). . . .
Trauma often causes the inadvertent association of disparate stimuli. . . . the
ability to retrieve information in a manner in which it can be translated into
words depends on compatibility with or similarity to current cues. . . .
The traumatized individual lives in two different worlds: the realm of
trauma (the past) and the realm of “ordinary” life (present). The realm of
trauma is internal reality–a world repetitive, solitary, and very importantly,
timeless. . . . . Further, these are utterly “incompatible worlds” ([van der
Kolk and van der Hart,] 1991, p. 449). . . . This explains why traumatized
individuals crave metaphor and imagery . . . to make sense of their worlds (527,
28).
We
can see from this description why Carruth assigns to trauma narratives the term
“gaps” and says rightly that the objective facts of the event are not
recoverable from this physical/psychological response. However, the disjunction
of the ordinary world is not absence, as the term “gap” indicates. Rather,
something is present–emotion, imaging, thought–and this something forms the
reality and truth of the individual’s experience of the event. If we are
looking to draw objective facts in a linear form–a narrative sequence--Carruth
is right; it cannot look like “objectivity,” which means really, with
respect to narrative, a version of how the ordinary world would structure the
facts of an event. But we can recover (an interesting conceptual metaphor
itself, that needs objection on grounds that it indicates putting the experience
out of sight) something of the truth of the experience, and this is what
experiencers who survive insist on telling, and what readers and interpreters
must attend to if their concern is to access and understand these experiences as
meaningfull.
From
Cohen’s summary of defining features of traumatic experience, five are central
to understanding what trauma worlds are and how to read them: (feature 1) the
presence of “discontinuity” of both physical and psychological experience,
and its status as both “defense” and “reflection”; (feature 2) the
“creation of arational, atemporal, and nonlinear constructs,” which are
therefore not amenable to the full range of reasoning processes and language resources, which depend on
concepts and on time-bound linearity; (feature 3) the defining experience of
“speechless terror,” an extreme emotion that stuns the experiencer out of
language; (feature 4) the experiencer’s shifted view from person to thing; and
(feature 5) the existence of “two
worlds”–“the realm of trauma” and “the realm of ‘ordinary’
life”–in which the experiencer is and continues to be past the event. These
two worlds exist, disjoined (i.e., neither is fragmented nor erased). All of
these features work against the construction of narrative. But tropical thought
is well-suited: flexible, imagistic, felt, preconceptual, indicative, and rich
with indicative possibility.
In
short-term, single-event trauma, the trauma world may be so sparse as hardly to
be called a world. In long-term repeating trauma however (as may occur, e.g., in
concentration camps, enslavement, prison, torture, war, severely dysfunctional
families), the trauma world may develop extensively and be maintained beside but
apart from the ordinary world. This happens because the experiencer lives in
both worlds, must survive, and must therefore maintain cognitive dissonance
between the ordinary world, which is organized meaningfully to promote life, and
the trauma world, which seems by contrast disorganized and threatens to
annihilate (Cohen 527). Cohen classes these worlds as post-traumatic paracosms:
“ spontaneously created, systematized private worlds. . . .
internally consistent and deeply significant to the individual . . . and
self-referential. . . . [they] include the internal reality’s environment,
architecture, values, culture, and constituents” (530). The alternate reality
of the trauma-induced world is much like the art world reality, Cohen says, in
its status as a “‘fundamental way of knowing the world’,” because
“[t]here is no mandate for sequential thought in the non-verbal mind; art
carries information differently than language–in visual images rather than in
words (528; quote is from Goodman). These images need not themselves be
narrative because form in art is content;
it alone can communicate” (529). The transfer of experience into art’s
visual language is, of course, a making of a textual world. It is not the same as the experience, even as imaged, as it is mediated
by the material and formal possibilities of art, just as transfer into
language would be by the linguistic medium. However, the visual, non-linear
nature of art is closer to the actual experience than language can approach.
Images are an inextricable component of semantic aspects of
metaphor, as Paul Ricoeur has cogently asserted and demonstrated (“The
Metaphoric Process”). They carry psychological/emotional meaning, and are
“emerging meaning” (147); they merge “sense and sense” (149). And they
are the chief carriers of reference in poetic worlds. Spoken and written trauma
accounts bear high proportions of tropes
because tropes must indicate the trauma world with its high content of
image and emotion, and because the trauma world
is discontinuous with the ordinary world that writers address and the
language they must address them in if they are to be understood at all. When
experiencers of long-term trauma write the trauma world, that world will appear
intermingled with the ordinary, as it must take on rationality, temporality, and
linearity in order to be communicated. The life of the trauma world maintains
itself in tropical formations and processes, as these are able to translate into
language from visual content and form.
In
addition, tropes are chief cognitive processes, the two main cognitive resources
for thinking and organizing our experience. The two major tropes–metaphor and
metonymy–underlie the production of language and life. We “live by”
underlying conceptual metaphors, such as “argument as war,” “time as
money,” and “theories are buildings” (Lakoff and Johnson). Metonymy allows
us to conceptualize by taking one example to stand for a whole and by
transferring functions (e.g., cause for effect, type for cause) (Lakoff). Yet,
we do not all think alike. Individual variation emerges from each person’s
mental representation, acquired from the general store, mingled with personal
history and local material. As a rule then, some tropes would have non-common
senses. As David Beres and Edward Joseph state, “all conscious psychic
activity” arises from unconscious structures which are called “mental
representations.” “A mental representation is a postulated unconscious
psychic organization capable of evocation in consciousness as symbol, fantasy,
thought, affect, or action.” We do not act directly to an external stimulus
but instead the external stimulus activates a mental representation and action
issues from it (Beres and Joseph 2,
6,7). Like any individual’s version, or mental representations, of the
ordinary world, paracosms are
mental representations: they are internally created, but differ from the
ordinary world in their individualized nature (the lack of consensuality) and
high degree of the visual and nonlinear aspects–features resulting from
traumatic response.
If
one’s aim is to understand an alternate world, then non-consensual content and
structure and their functioning are of paramount importance. Understanding how
that world means is necessary to understanding what
it means. If we do not understand the world on its own terms, we misunderstand
and misread its differences from and contiguities with the ordinary, consensual
world. Thus, what we consider the nature and function of tropes in a specific
text determines the understanding and interpretation we make of how individual
writings function in social and political contexts.
Theorizing
Tropes and the Trauma World
–I
believe that every militant chemist can confirm it: that one must distrust the
almost-the-same . . . the differences can be small, but they can lead to
radically different consequences.
–Primo
Levi (The Periodic Table, p. xii)
–That night the soup tasted of corpses.
–Elie Wiesel (Night, p.
62)
Although
accounts of history proceed largely through metonymic process, abstracting whole
from cases (Foucault, White), texts relating traumatic experience, by contrast,
have to rely on metaphor. In narrative accounts, concept metaphors enable
communication with readers, but they (1) undercut and oppose them to indicate
the disjunction with ordinary world concepts and (2) complicate them with
non-conceptual metaphor to indicate aspects of the trauma world that have no
ordinary world similarities. The incapacity of already-available concept
metaphors to represent the trauma world thrusts tropical language into the role
of indicating–through gesture toward traumatic experience–and signals the
world’s radical difference from the ordinary world. While experiencers can
think the trauma world, without shared concepts, readers cannot–unless there
is a way possible through indicative tropes.
In
trauma narratives, the typical strategy is to relate facts of the event and use
tropes to point toward the sense of the world, to build its thought, feel, and
moral dimensions. Tropes that do not have conventional concepts attached to
them, or suggest more than conventional concept metaphors do, serve this
function. These are the tropes by which poetry (i.e., literary texts) acquires
and indicates its reality and truth. While conventional tropical language
anchors the reader in the ordinary world of meaning, non-conventional tropical
language functions to create a “surplus” of meaning (Ricoeur’s term, used
throughout Interpretation Theory) that
supplies more meaning than the conventional. In the traditional understanding,
metaphor is regarded as an expression that does not make literal sense. In
various theories it is called false, nonsense, absurd. Its presence functions to
send the reader on a search for meaning for similarity across two incompatible
semantic domains, while the grammar holds out incompatibility (difference)
through its literal assertion. For example, when Elie Wiesel says, after
watching a young boy hanged for sabotage at Auschwitz, “That night the soup
tasted of corpses,” we see this as a metaphor because in the ordinary world,
soup could not be made of corpses. Corpses belong in the semantic domain of
death, not food ingredients. This awareness prompts a search for other meaning
than the literal one. We look for relevant domains: death–perhaps Wiesel is
experiencing some kind of death after watching the courageous,
rebellious youth hanged. But what kind of death?
And what about that extra, that overflow? A creepy, sinking feeling,
distaste, perhaps in our mouths, a tightening in the stomach, revulsion, perhaps
a darkening space around us, who have become, through a fuller, felt
participation in the image, intensely aware of body. Aware, perhaps, of
isolation from everything else but this moment. Perhaps aware of terror, even
shame. In the first instant of taking in the literal sense, we very likely
recoil, we resist even letting the thought into awareness: so strong is the
taboo against eating human bodies, so strong is the desire–no, the animal
instinct–to live. We want, naturally, to protect ourselves. But there is that
soup, and that soup is all there is to eat–and eat or die. To read this fully
is to take in its awareness, to be cognizant of the felt and morally chaotic
experience it tells of. It is to begin to think
of that world of experience.
Although the specific responses will vary from reader to reader, some
such physical and cognitive responses will attend the visual image arising in us
through the trope. Paul Ricoeur, whose interactive theory is the richest and
most elaborated of metaphor theories, says that this operation gives metaphoric
utterances stereoscopic depth, because the ordinary world is held in tension
with the newly-created world: “The metaphoric utterance not only abolishes but
preserves the literal sense” (“Metaphorical Process” 152). The
estrangement from the ordinary impels a sense of a strange world–a new world
previously unthought, apart from but near the ordinary world.
Interpreting
via conventional concept metaphor tends to cancel the strange, new world–if it
is seen at all.3 The reason for this is that the trope is regarded as
deviant or false, and this process reads the trope back into the terms of
ordinary world, assimilating the trope’s meaning and world into it (Levin 2,
3). Corpses mean “death,” and the wealth of sensation and thought fades
back, unrealized. The psychological component flows back into abstract
reduction, tamed, and the reader moves on. This is the point at which our usual
ways of reading conventional and nonconventional metaphors end, for we can reach
resolution of tension between the literal and figurative meanings through
congruence with the ordinary world. Yet, as Ricoeur argues, the “psychological
moment” of imaging produces a sensing and sense of the world that lies beyond
the borders of the ordinary; it is a necessary component of the semantic aspect
of metaphor–so necessary, he asserts (and demonstrates) that no theory of
metaphor can achieve even its own aims without it (141).
As
I noted above, Levin regards this connective resolution of metaphor to
conventional meanings as an assimilation of the
newly-created world into ordinary world; assimilation happens as a result
of the failure to apprehend a metaphor as a new conceptual world. Assimilation
enables an expansion of the ordinary world, but if there is a separate new world
being posited and indicated through metaphor, then the price of assimilation is
erasure of the newly-created experiential world as an “achieved
comprehension” (20). And while Levin agrees for the most part with Ricoeur’s
approach, he insists that sometimes some writers mean some metaphors to be taken
literally because they are writing of another, real way of experiencing the
world. A new experiential world is not governed by conventional concepts;
therefore it cannot be thought in those concepts, but it can nevertheless be thought
through tropes. Readers cannot “think” it, but they can “think of”
it. For these metaphors, the price of assimilation is the loss of the meaningfullness
indicated in tropical thought. To gain meaningfulness, the reader has to try to
“think of,” or “conceive of” the world according to the literal sense of
the metaphors. Levin’s principal example is Wordsworth, whose metaphors of
nature in happy communion (e.g., various waters “roaring with one voice” in
“Mt. Snowden”), invite us into the communion of living, joyful nature, where
the poet himself is. “Doing so,” Levin says, “forces
us to conceive of a world in which nature is ‘alive’, in which a community
of spirit exists between ourselves and the objects of nature. To conceive of a
river as loving, of nature as breathing, opens up for us a world different from
the ordinary world of our senses and cognitions. This is a metaphoric world, a
world of our own making, a world, it is my contention, that Wordsworth realized
in his own thought and on the basis of which he wrote such lines as [we find in]
The Prelude” (236). Wordsworth,
Levin argues, invites readers to “conceive of a world or state of affairs
whose nature, in its abrogation of the canons that govern existential relations
in our world, is estranged from common notions of reality and may rightly be
termed metaphoric” (237). To think of this world is take its metaphors as
literal, as the real thought of a distinct, not similar, not
able-to-be-assimilated world. The conclusion of Levin’s proposal for reading
is that metaphoric worlds are conceptual: they present and intend to elicit,
through experience of their literal senses, new conceptual grasp of reality. The
metaphoric world comprises a whole way of thinking, and its metaphors serve to
indicate the literalness of its newly-thought, uncommon conceptualization.
Levin
regards Wordsworth’s sublime experience as a cognitive achievement, and one
that is ineffable because it can be neither thought nor spoken in
the terms of the ordinary world. Because such experiences are outside of the
everyday world of common experience, metaphors have to serve to convey them to
readers through their non-deviant literalness. Like experiences of the sublime,
traumatic experience is ineffable, cannot be thought or spoken through the
already-made terms of language, and is outside of everyday common experience.
Experiencers are thrown back onto the cognitive resources of nonconceptual
tropes to conceive of their experience and to conceive the experiential world.
Like sublime experience, traumatic experience abrogates the rules and laws that
order relations in the everyday world. The ordinary world is organized to
support life and sociality; the trauma world is organized for survival a reality
whose single overwhelming constant is the threat of annihilation. The trauma
world isolates and cuts off sociality, it shrinks context to the immediate
event’s relation to the individual’s need to get away from the threat. It
erases context, and its rules. Trauma’s happenings are unpredictable and elude
systematization. It is the antithesis of the sublime’s pervasive aliveness,
communion, and total sociality among dimensions of context. It is also the
antithesis of ordered, predictive relational rules and of our modern
internal/external metaphysical split. These antitheses, in fact, form the
conceptual bridge between worlds. Since ineffable experience cannot be
understood in ordinary world terms, the trauma world emerges and developing
tropically, and if speaking or writing that is motivated toward communication
ensues, the experiencer must use the full range of metaphoric resources if she
is to enable the reader to enter the world of the trauma experience. If the
reader follows the way of reading Levin suggests, if some metaphors are read off
conventional concept metaphors and some are taken literally, what was
unthinkable becomes thinkable.
The
question then is, do writers of traumatic
experience ask us to take at least some metaphors literally? I think the answer
is yes. I offer two reasons. One: the trauma world is not ruled by ordinary
world concepts and canons of reasoning. It is arational, and subsequent
rationality in ordinary world terms yields a world that is, in many ways, the
antithesis to the ordinary world in its striving to annihilate the individual.
In its isolation and absence of context, it lacks sociality, which the ordinary
world is organized to promote. Two: because the trauma world is atemporal,
arational, nonlinear, and highly imagistic, tropes leap in where concepts and
narrative cannot go. To read the world as other than this is to lose its
essential character as well as its means of making sense.
These
two reasons–lack of concepts for a thought and consequential use of tropes for
its content and effects–are the ones Levin explores as the motivating basis
for his category of the “conceiving of” metaphor. His excursion through
Giambattista Vico’s explanation of language’s development of concepts out of
tropes (Chapter Five) is helpful to understanding how tropical thought is base
and indicator of the trauma world.
Working
from the evidence of early poetry, Vico discovered that all tropes were
initially catachretic. Early thinking of the world was very different from our
descriptions of the actual nature of the things. Rather, it was more like
Wordsworth’s comprehension of the world as alive and continually and fully
interacting with human beings. Before our modern metaphysical view came into
being, conceptions were figural projections from human experience outward onto
the world. The world was experienced and thought of as alive with passion and
feeling. That their view was composed of projections early humans had no way of
knowing, for they had not yet acquired the later split between the external
actual world and their internal human experience. As science developed, the
external world came to be described in its own nature, but prior to that it
could not be conceived as such. Vico discovered that catachretic expressions
took the place we now have for conceiving the world. He says that early humans
“spoke in poetic characters” (quoted in Levin 120) to describe and think of
their world. But they did not see they were making likeness. Their figural
language, taken from the human figure, named the world as they thought it really
was. To them, the poetic words were literal; their ordinary world looks to us
like a poetic world only in retrospect.
Catachresis
is one of two types of metaphor discussed in classical rhetoric. The first type
is the traditional. It involves a choice of a different term where another,
usual, literal one is available. It is the metaphor that theory has almost
exclusively been concerned with describing and explaining. The motivation for
this type has traditionally been regarded as decorative, that is, applied, in
the artistic sense, where it doesn’t belong in order to vivify or to excite
the passions. To put it simply, as a non-literal choice, it is regarded as a
deviance from the ordinary term and sense. It functions to estrange at the same
time as it links up to similarities in the ordinary understanding of the world.
The
second type of metaphor discussed in classical rhetoric is catachresis. This
type emerges to fill a gap when no term for a thought is available. Thus, it is
not a choice from among options, so it can be neither regarded as nor processed
as a deviance from ordinary language. Levin
quotes Vico: “Catachresis is thus metaphor by default–compare Quintillian [Institution
Oratoria, Vol. III, 303] where he says, ‘As an example of a necessary
metaphor [i.e., catachresis], I may quote the following usage in vogue with
peasants when they call a vinebud gemma,
a gem (what other term was there they could use?)” (121). Catachresis grabs an
image to fill in a conceptual gap in language. Furthermore, Levin points out,
“as Vico describes the origin and nature of the tropes they are all
catachretic in their motivation” (121). In Vico’s understanding, all the
tropes originally functioned as nondeviant; they were the means of conceiving
the world where no language for the conception existed before. Language was thus
invented out of catachretic expressions.4 Only in retrospect do we
regard tropes as “poetic.” When there is no choice, “tropes are
the proper mode.” Catachretic metaphors “become conceptual metaphors only
from the perspective of subsequent metaphysical development” (123). Vico’s
evidence for the catachretic development of language is the lexicon:
It
is noteworthy that in all languages the greater part of the expressions relating
to inanimate things are formed by metaphors from the human body and its parts
and from the human senses and passions. Thus, head for top or beginning; the
brow and shoulders of a hill; the eyes of needles and of potatoes; mouth for any
opening’ the lip of a cup or pitcher; the teeth of a rake, saw, comb; . . .
the flesh of fruits; a vein of rock or mineral; the blood of grapes for wine;
the bowels of the earth. Heaven or sea smiles; the wind whistles; the waves
murmur; a body groans under a great weight. The farmers of Latium used to say
the fields were thirsty, bore fruit, were swollen with grain; and our rustics
speak of plants making love, vines growing mad, resinous trees weeping (quoted
in Levin 123, 24; from Vico 405).
If
early humans did not think that the world was separate from them, but alive and
bodied like them, then all of these metaphors are catachretic. A river has a
mouth because it is a being. A
mountain has a foot because it is a being.
Following
Vico’s view of early metaphysics, Levin considers these terms as literal;
early on the world was thought in human terms. But Levin notices that two kinds
of catachretic functions appear in Vico’s discussion. Lexical terms are
projected from the human body to name things in the world. These, he says, would
be considered catachretic even by classical rhetoric. But another type insists
that nature also functions as a body– pregnant, giving birth, feeling thirst,
love, madness, and sorrow. This second type would be considered decorative, not
catachretic by classical rhetoric. If these of the second type are catachretic,
as Vico and Levin claim, then the world was conceived and thought of as exactly
what was said (124).
When
we read trauma accounts, at least sometimes the tropical language seems to mean
what it literally says and the trauma world seems most accurate in tropical
terms. Why? I suggest that the five features of the trauma world I noted earlier
as central to this issue correspond to features of Vico’s view of early human
thinking and language development. First (feature 1): Disruption of and
discontinuity with everyday ordinary reality with regard to bodily and psychic
experience create a situation of lack of terms for actors and acts, like the
situation of early humans. The projections, however, arise from the
experiencer’s prior store of knowledge, and they are grabbed to stand for
thought without even the organization the human body has. The tropes will thus
appear radically disorganized, because they are self-referential, pieced from
the person’s total knowledge store. If we try to read them entirely on the
basis of shared meanings and functions, we are in danger of serious misreading.
Second (feature 2): Trauma is felt and known in body and psyche, and imaged in
sudden tropical emergences that have to stand as literal since there was no
reasoned choice of terms, no time for choice in the arational, atemporal sudden
freezing in the moment. The tropes that emerge are
the thought/feeling of the experience. Third (feature 3): A traumatic experience
is one of “speechless terror.” It cannot be spoken or understood as it is
happening, and further, as it continues past the time of the event, it remains
cognized in the literalness of its tropes. In long-term trauma of repeated
threat, the individual conceives of the trauma in more tropical formations
specific to each situation, thereby developing and elaborating a world where the
trauma exists. The experiencer projects the entire trauma world according to her
experience of it, grabbing terms for actors and acts from familiar images and
contexts, but these lose their familiar meanings as they arose to serve the
exigence of self-survival. Fourth
(feature four): A main strategy for self-survival during trauma is to think
oneself is a thing. The thought is that one literally
is a thing. This feature is stated as a constant of traumatic experience,
and it reveals that the mind is not thinking according to the ordinary world.
The world is self-enclosed, without the awareness
of doubleness, or the possibility for choice, irony, or deception. It is a
literal world. To access the experiential world requires reading it literally.
Fifth (feature five): The fact that the trauma world is disjoined and disparate
from the ordinary world means that it cannot be communicated without bridging;
but the trauma world, with its self-referential world of literal tropical
language, resists transportation into language. If speaking and writing begin,
the experiencer retains partial tropical conception, or the trauma world cannot
be conveyed, and transfigures some of the world into communicable terms. The
trauma world is not recognizable from
the perspective of the ordinary world, but some its tropes can be retained as
indicators of its literalness. The
indicative nature of tropes offers the reader a way to think of
the trauma world by feeling and imagining what is elicited for her through the
tropes. The writer has to negotiate back and forth between the linear, temporal,
and rational and the alinear, atemporal, arational experience, identifying
tropes that will convey into conventional conceptual tropes but also indicate to
a reader the literalness of the lived traumatic experience. Thus, we can expect
texts to retain literal tropes as indicators for reading the way the world
fully was, and these may often double as familiar concept metaphors and
applied (“decorative”) metaphors. But if taken literally by the reader,
these metaphors are capable of eliciting the thoughtfull,
meaningfull experience of the traumatic events and a fuller knowledge of
the writer’s true (vs. transformed) experience.
Reading
Trauma World Tropes
–As
I swallowed my bowl of soup, I saw in gesture an act of rebellion and protest
against Him.
And I nibbled by crust of bread.
In
the depths of my heart, I felt a great void.
–Elie
Wiesel (Night,
p. 66)
–Bread, soup–these were my whole life.
I was a body. Perhaps less
than that eve: a starved stomach. The
stomach alone was aware of the passage of time.
–Elie
Wiesel (Night, p. 50)
–The
Lager is
hunger: we ourselves are hunger, living hunger. . . . The Lager, hardly dead,
had already begun to decompose.
–Primo
Levi (Survival at Auschwitz, p. 74, p.
158)
To
support these extrapolations, I will next explore a case example of a trauma
world, searching its tropes for origins, functional meanings for actors and
acts, and transformations during its transference into language. The case
example will give a view of how such a world develops tropically and looks,
aside from and before mingling with the ordinary world through language.5
Then I will explore the two trauma narratives that I have quoted in the
epigraphs to locate catachretic metaphors and test the gains of a literal
reading.
Exploring
the Trauma World: An Example. The experiencer in this case was subjected to
life-threatening situations over a period of at least fifteen years, virtually
her entire childhood. Because of repeated threats over a long time, and because
the source agents of threat came from within the home, she created a richly
elaborated trauma world that was maintained to function to contain the traumatic
experience. As two psychologists who spent time in Nazi concentration camps,
Victor Frankl and Bruno Betelheim, have both said, children in these situations
live under conditions like those in the concentration camps: they have no way
out, the whole of their being is under threat of destruction, and they maintain
the world of the traumatic experience, and maintain it separately, disjoined
from the everyday world (see also Cohen 527, 28, partially quoted above).
Because the two worlds are radically disparate in actions, expectations, roles,
relationships, morality, order, and predictability, figures of actors and acts
look nonordinary and disordered. As the trauma world emerges from the single
constant of threat, and is maintained in the presence of continuing threat, some
figures, particularly those standing in for the threatening presence,
appear as pervasive entities throughout the world.
I
will draw a few, illustrative examples from the subject’s visual and written
productions (drawings, journals, notes, poems, prose). These are supplemented by
discussion with the subject’s therapist.
In
one incident (not the first), at age five, the subject’s grandfather cut open
her arm, probably with a butcher knife, along the inside of the elbow, missing a
major artery by an eighth of an inch. The wound exposed the bone and healed to a
four-inch scar that remained large, pink, and ragged for more than a decade. The
incident took place in the garage, which doubled as the grandfather’s
carpentry shop, where the knives for butchering hogs raised on the farm were
kept. The trauma world contained a figure of a large snake, blood-red in color.
Its figural action was swallowing a previous succession of minor figures, some
which were human figures and some of which were non-human figures, whose
function had been to protect against the threat. Swallowing these figures was
also an act of protection: it meant getting them safely away from threat and
keeping them hidden. As the figures all stood in for the subject, they were the
means of imaging the near failure but finally successful effort to keep the
threat from harming the subject. The figures and their figural acts stood in for
the subject, but the grandfather appeared as a large, dark, looming solid
shape–a thing emptied of “grandfather.” This shape–a thing, but
motive–experientially displaced and stood in the place of the actual
grandfather. This shape was the figural thought of the pervasive sense of
threat, it was not confined to the body shape but suffused mist-like the entire
scene. And nothing existed but the
scene. Everything else was a response to this pervasive encompassing sense.
When
the subject began to examine the figures, she thought the snake was taken from
the garden of Eden story, with which she was quite familiar with that age.
Reading from the Biblical story back onto the trauma world, she arrived at this
interpretation, just as we might: the figure was a reversal of the destructive
snake, engaged in act of protection against a family member’s authority.
Because the Eden snake objected to God’s command and survived, and the humans
in the story hid from God, it seemed a likely parallel. However, this could not
be the meaning within the experience of a five-year-old, who has not reached the
age of self-reflection and moral development (which is about age ten). In
addition, this gives only a rational meaning, it does give the “thought” of
the experience itself. In checking
this incident with her mother, the subject learned that during the previous
summer her father had attempted to kill with an axe a snake that had made its
home (its hole) by the entrance to the house. He failed on the first attempt,
only cutting half way through the neck. For days, until he completed the act,
the snake kept appearing partway out of the whole with its bleeding cut neck.
The mother reported that the subject had been so upset the snake was being
killed and showing itself that she cried for days. This snake is a more likely
source for the figure in the wounding incident. The snake had been deeply cut by
a family member using an everyday instrument, and the subject reacted with
unconsolable crying, as the subject would almost certainly have done after being
wounded. The subject’s arm was bloody and deeply cut, and held a white bone
which had been unseen and secret until the wounding. The actual snake wounding
and the subject’s wounding share key likenesses. However, the figural snake
was blood-red in color, pervasive through and through, and the secret space
inside it for hiding was protective, just as the actual snake’s hole had
appeared to the girl as both holding a secret and protecting the snake from
further wounding, at least for a while. Of
course, this kind of imagined protection works only if believed to be
literally real, which it was as psychically conceived, internal trauma
world.
I
bring in this incident because it demonstrates how the figures in a trauma world
may be mixed or fused with personal history, how easily they can misread, and
how inadequately they may capture the thought of the trauma world. The figural
snake enabled the incident to be thought, and it was
its thought. From within the trauma world, the subject had insisted to the
therapist that the snake was a snake, not her, and that the shape was not her
grandfather, but only looked like him. The snake was not blood, but was the
color of blood. Swallowing was also a literal act.
In other words, the trauma world is one of literal sense–it is
catachretic. There are no substitute words within the world, they are literal,
and they require us to enter the literalness if we are to grasp the experience
as it was for the subject. The process is a piecemeal projection from the
internalized mental representation of the everyday world of personal history and
context and of cultural story onto the trauma world, rather than projection of a
whole systematic sense of human body, as in Vico’s examples. The suddenness
and radical atemporality, arationality, and nonlinearity of trauma makes
inevitable the process of grabbing piecemeal whatever is available from wherever
for figural thought.
In
a later incident, the subject’s father held her at rifle-point while she held
her pet cat in her arms. The father kept demanding she put the cat down, and
when she finally did, he killed the cat right at her feet with one shot. The
father disposed of the cat, so that she could not bury it in the cat cemetery as
she always did with favorite cats that died. This incident happened at age ten,
and in the trauma world, the subject appears in the shape of a ten-year-old,
dark and transparent and mist-like, taking up the very sense of space. The place
is grave-like though not a grave; and the figure is “dead,” which when asked
she said means “not feeling.” The figure is nameless, alive, but not moving,
and not able to be shot because “dead.” This figure served as an act of
protection against intolerable feeling and also against the possibility of being
shot herself. A tombstone in the scene is also an active, animate figure. It is
made of stone, but it is made of heart: it figures the thought of memory of the
cat, which didn’t have an actual burial. In addition, it is fused with the
subject: it is a girl, it is the thought of the subject’s own heart turned to
stone, paradoxically undieable and “dead” (unfeeling). And probably it
figures as the target at which the rifle was aimed, for the girl held her cat in
her arms at the heart while the rifle was pointed at her.
A stone can neither feel, nor die. The feelings behind the figures were
identified as terror, rage, grief, sadness, consolation, and safety. The world
was pervaded by the sound of the rifle shot, coming in from the great
interminable surrounding distance.
Exploring
Figuration in Written Accounts: Two Examples. There
are no edges to the subject’s trauma world, just as there are none in the
Lager world of Wiesel’s and Levi’s experiences. The trauma world is all that
exists–a universe, atemporal and nonlinear. The entire world is animate, an
active pervading threat that is a universe: its figures actively seek to
annihilate. In addition, they work across domains, as they must take figures
from the everyday world, the only one available, across into the trauma world.
The figures standing in for the experience are gestures of the sense of the
world–sensory thought, as Ricoeur would say. When writing the world entirely
from the trauma world perspective, it cannot be understood, except by
others who know before hand what such a world is. In the case drawn from above,
the subject wrote poetry from the trauma world perspective; given a poem titled,
“Cats” only one of fifteen readers (all of whom were poets) understood what
was happening. That reader was familiar with traumatic experience. (This is like
other ineffable experiences: readers who already know the experience recognize
and read the world based on prior knowledge. They know what the indicators
mean.) All fifteen, however, said it was “intense,” “powerful, . . .”:
they grasped the sense of the experience itself, if not the facts. And, they
understood the few lines that made a plot and figure relation to a Biblical
story. This portion was not in the
trauma world, but had been inserted to accomplish a meaning shared by ordinary
readers. With two other texts, and a different set of five readers, comments
were of two kinds: the reader cannot “enter” the text, or cannot “exit”
it. The self-enclosed, self-referential nature made it inaccessible, except that
all the reader said the texts had a powerful and overwhelming sense of terror.
The two aspects that readers grasped--terror and an inability to understand what
was happening–are truer what traumatic experience
is than are bare, objective facts.
But
readers generally want a distance, and they want events in a way they can
understand. The felt sense and the
frustration of not being able to understand may be a key part of the experience,
but it has to be toned down in degree and proportion in a communicable text. In
addition, writing requires time, sequence, reflection, reasoning, verbal syntax:
that is, it has to become mostly
ordinary world and ordinary language. The
trauma world appears, in at least some of its figuration, and we can read it if
we can locate and suffer the frustration and other feeling and thought so as not
cut off its literal sense. Consider again Wiesel’s metaphor, “the soup
tasted of corpses.” Take it literally, try to think of that world in which
dead bodies are eaten, and tasted. Try to taste the taste of corpses. We most
likely recoil from what may have initially passed
us by, or flickered not quite into awareness. In the ordinary world, in
that world ordered to promote human life, we are expected
to recoil. Think also that there might be a world in which the soup indeed did
taste of corpses. This might have been literally true in Wiesel’s experience,
in the heightened sensory experience of trauma. It is the effects of trauma in
the body and on (in) consciousness that the metaphor is capable of eliciting.
The metaphor also stands in for the literalness of dead human bodies pervading
all aspects of the experience: dead bodies are an abstraction, they are the
specific, actual result of the living, active destroyer the camp is. It is bodily fear and revulsion, the absence of spirit, and
moral shame. It is to eat death, to eat each other to survive. But in the
moment, it is the eating of corpses. It is all there is to eat. Wiesel must eat,
to survive is to eat. But the figure is tamed for us by Wiesel just before we
get to this point. He has heard someone ask that frequent refrain in the camp,
“Where is God now?” And Wiesel writes” “And I heard a voice within me
answer him: Where is He? Here He is–He is hanging there on the gallows . . .
.” (62, Wiesel’s ellipsis). The “He” is God transferred into a
courageous rebel youth who had been one of a few brave saboteurs of the camp’s
electric power station and who was hanged that day, and no one had lifted a hand
to stop it. Certainly the death of God, the death of justice, the death of
innocence and courage are indicated through the metaphor. Reversals are
gestured: the Seder meal’s memory of emancipation, and the Christian
Eucharist’s enspiriting, life-renewing and forgiving of sin (a few pages later
Wiesel mentions Calvary) are turned toward indicating forced prisoning,
deadening, a spiritless way of surviving. Another degree of the destruction of
the human person, another piece sheared away. One of the most important pieces
of identity. Soup consumed in order for the body to continue.
Perhaps
these meanings linked with the ordinary world are
more important than the sense of the world itself. Or is that a separation that
can’t be made? In other words, can the ordinary world meanings be unhooked or
ignored without changing or losing the sense of the trauma world? What happens
if we do this? I think we lose the sense of “speechless terror,” the
defining aspect of traumatic experience. It is easy to do, because the account
is made of words and we readers are at a distance, a safe distance where the
threat of annihilation can’t reach us. But if we take even some of the
metaphors as literal, we begin to close the distance, we try to “think of”
what it would be, that world with no names for things and actions, with only
image for sight, taste, touch, sound, smell; with only these now rising in our
bodies and starkly filling our minds.
Where
are the metaphors that engage specifically this literal sense? Some pervade
texts, occurring throughout, and collect to indicate the trauma world’s felt
sense. In the context of these recurring metaphors, others may acquire
literalness as aspects or parts of the recurring metaphors. Throughout Survival
at Auschwitz, Primo Levi regards the Lager as an animate being. It is the
whole world, no one can see beyond it or know beyond it, and it is actively
working in every aspect and function to annihilation the prisoners piece by
piece--social identities, intellect, reasoning, beliefs, body, and spirit (hope,
courage, dignity). The Lager is an organism; it devours; even the sky, ground,
and the weather are aligned: “Dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as
though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to assist in our
destruction” (16); “what happened to the others, to the women, to the
children, to the old men . . . the night swallowed them up, purely and simply”
(20); “the sun sets in a tumult of fierce, blood-red clouds” (29). And the
sky threatens, even a first warm sunny spring day--the “good day” (subject
and title of a chapter)--turns on them, destroying their sense of beauty, hope,
and a new beginning, for it is stark reminder that they have none of these. Near
the end of the book, after the Nazis had fled, the Lager begins to
“decompose,” and the prisoners are figured as worms, evidence of life that
assists decay. These kinds of metaphors aggregate to suggest an applied
metaphor, but if they are also read as literal, we have the sense of the world
as it is in trauma, encompassing, alive, one being who acts “purely and
simply” to destroy.
But
there is another set of metaphors which insist that we take them literally, and
they help to signal that those others might also be meant so. “But how could
one imagine not being hungry? The
Lager is hunger: we ourselves are hunger, living hunger” (74). The
italics tell us to take the metaphor literally. Hunger is the single reality in
that dark space that has no edges. It is everything, all feeling, thought,
sense, the whole reality. In Night is
a similar passage: “I took little interest in anything except my daily plate
of soup and my crust of bread. Bread, soup,–these were my whole life. I was a
body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved
stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time” (50). If we read
“I am a body” as a literal metaphor, it doesn’t stand in for a part of the whole person, it is the whole person. It can’t be an applied metaphor, nor a
literal non-metaphoric statement. Rather it stands in for the true experience,
the sensory thought of that moment in the Lager world, which is known to have
already destroyed everything else. Then Levi zooms in closer, thinks further:
“Perhaps less even than that: a starved
stomach.” Annihilated,
except for that. Stomach is alive, it is the whole being, desiring, conscious,
knowing, unsatisfied, fearing extinction. As literal the metaphor indicates the
sensory thought of that moment. It says--This is how it is, purely and
simply–try to think of this. When we begin to read it across the ordinary
world domain as applied metaphor (and we must do this, but not only this), we
have already begun to lose actual experience; the thought-figure fills the
consciousness, it cannot be reasoned. It makes a great difference whether we
stop first to absorb the metaphor’s literal indications.
Conclusion
At
the outset of this essay, I suggested that readers, scholars, and teachers of
trauma writings need to know what traumatic experience is and what it entails
for reading trauma experience more accurately and meaningfully. I suggested that
narrative’s linear movement and ordinary world language and organizations
enable communication, but their price is the loss or reduction of the sense of
the traumatic world. I then suggested that the trauma world might be retained,
at least in some texts at some places, in certain catachretic metaphors, which
indicate the speechless terror itself, and that these indicators collect to
indicate the “thought” of the trauma world. Finally, following Levin’s way
of reading, I explored how catachretic metaphors might be located and
“conceived of.” This way of reading ushers us into trauma worlds, the
experience of a person, to permit a fuller knowing of the what the person has to
communicate. Since traumatic experience has major features common to all
experienciers–results of annihilating threat and dealing with threat–it is
one of humanity’s ineffable experiences. Like Wordsworth writing a sublime
world, experiencers of trauma who survive it return, and some of them tell of
it. I think we should listen, we should try “to think of” their world--Levin
says we have a “duty” to “conceive of” metaphoric worlds (80).
But
in addition, this way of reading has implications for reading other kinds of
writing. For example, the individuality of persons researchers such as Christina
Haas ask us to seek and preserve in our studies of student writing might be read
in the particularity and aggregation of even concept metaphors. But attempts to
express what students have no words for may have catachretic features. Homi
Bhabha has suggested that all hybrid discourse is catachretic.
And for historiography: A central dilemma is that, as Hayden White puts
it, “the aporias of temporality . . . must be spoken about in the idiom of
symbolic discourse rather than that of logical or scientific discourse.” While
narrative has its own symbolic imaginary (plot) laid on events, the temporality
of all human experience is always highly figurative. Actual experience of time
is “‘within-time-ness’ . . . the only experience of temporality human
beings can know” (148). Trauma experience is an erasure of temporality, in
which thought is “without-time-ness.” The symbolic imaginary is plotless,
cleared of that field, making it more possible to see ways we might remake our
thinking–our collective cultural plots–in new terms. It might have occurred
to the savvy reader somewhere during this essay that many of the root metaphors
Lakoff and Turner discuss are entirely inapplicable to trauma worlds: e.g., Life
is a journey, Death is a deliverer, Death is a departure, Time flows, Time is
money, Life is light, Life is a fluid. While metaphors, in the theories of
deviance, are thought to expand the ordinary world, trauma worlds, like sublime
worlds, don’t expand it, they resist it assimilation. They ask for a
different, not an extended, perspective. To
bring the trauma world into the
everyday ordinary world would require such a reorganizing of the world’s core
that to do so would render the ordinary world unrecognizable.
It would constitute a different world.
That is one reason it is so difficult to read these worlds, why we recoil
and resist, and why we don’t understand well their terrible costs.
For while these writers detail the “facts” of the events, it is the
psychic and other human costs that are more damaging and that stay with their
bearers for the long-term after the body is healed.
And the terrible non-physical costs is why we may also want to exercise
caution in taking student readers too fully into trauma worlds.
paper
published in Journal of Advanced
Composition, February 2005 (special double issue on Trauma Studies)
1.
For an excellent elucidation of the tension between metonymy and metaphor as
historiographic method, see Maura B. Nelson’s excellent and extensive
analysis, “Metaphoric History: Narrative and New Science in the Work of F.W.
Maitland.”
2.
For instance, every essay in the newly-added section on terrorism in Lynn Z.
Bloom’s reader, The Essay Connection,
Seventh Edition, is an analysis of cultural concept metaphors.
Those writers who are exposing them to view, argue we need new concepts.
And that is the problem: how do we, as a social/political
group of many many millions, discover and acquire a new core concept?
These concepts lie deep under our language, motivating our ability to see,
think, use language, make meaning, and act.
3. A
good demonstration of how concept metaphors yield meaning in poetic worlds is
Lakoff and Turner’s More Than Cool
Reason. Their interpretation of
poems shows how we access poetic worlds, but the result of stopping there as
they do is a felt flatness resulting from domesticating the metaphors in
resolving them entirely by reference to the ordinary world.
This way of reading misses the strangeness, the difference that poetic
worlds sometimes ask us to enter. The
concept metaphors enable us to enter,
they act as bridges, but we are asked to look around beyond them. As Levin
suggests, we are asked to think of the world itself. Certainly in a poet like Emily Dickinson, from whose work
Lakoff and Turner provide many examples of their way of reading, tame reading
loses Dickinson’s indicative states of feeling and consciousness that her best
poetry attempts to communicate.
4.
Lakoff’s and Lakoff and Johnson’s work on metonymy and metaphor,
respectively, support this insight. They
assert that these tropes underlie the “world we live by” as root concepts
from which thought and language about our world are generated.
In their view, the origins of our ordering of the everyday world are
evident in a small set of root concepts and can be read from “satellite”
metaphors (Levin’s term, 5), which are the so-called dead metaphors (though
not dead for Lakoff and Johnson since we still live by them) that indicate we
think of argument as war, time as money, theories as buildings, and so on.
5. I would like to express my gratitude to the subject (client) for giving me permission to have full access to this case. I would like to acknowledge the assistance of the therapist on this case for helping me understand trauma in general as well as this specific trauma world; my gratitude to her also. She affirms that in her experience with survivors of ongoing severe abuse in childhood where the perpetrators were family members or other close caretakers, the response to the trauma experience has the same kind of figural nature and workings as in this case, although the internal worlds vary in richness and tone. In this case, the wealth of resources the subject had acquired made possible the unusual richness of figures: the subject had heard Bible stories read at least weekly in church and Sunday school, for certain periods of time daily in the home; and she learned to read on her own by age five. The therapist, who wishes to remain anonymous, is also a researcher, professor, and former editor of a major professional journal.
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