Vous êtes sur la page 1sur 2

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Introduction: The Wound and the Voice Caruth engages in a discussion with Sigmund Freuds Beyond the Pleasure Principle within which he describes a pattern of suffering that is inexplicably persistent in the lives of certain individuals (1). She notes his suggestion that these persons are perplexed by the terrifyingly literal nightmares of battlefield survivors are the repetitive re-enactments of people who have experienced painful events (1). She also mentions Freuds marvelling at the peculiar and sometimes uncanny way in which catastrophic events seem to repeat themselves for those who have passed through them (1). This is a striking argument because the repetitions seem not to occur as an initiation by the individuals own acts but rather they seem to be the result of a fate where they are subjected to a series of painful events that seem to be wholly beyond their wish or control. Caruth delves further as she engages with Freuds use of Gerusalemme Liberata by Tasso as the most moving poetic picture of fate. From this Freud creates a definition of traumatic neurosis which emerges as the unwitting re-enactment of an event that one cannot simply leave behind (2). Caruth argues that if Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. Ant is at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience precisely meet (3). Through Tassos story of Tancred, Caruth draws the conclusion that it is always the story of the wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or a truth that is not otherwise available. The aim in this book is to explore the ways in which texts of a certain period both psychoanalysis of literature and literary theory speak about and speak through the profound story of traumatic experience. The texts in this book engage with the central problem of listening, knowing and of representing that which emerges from the actual experience of the crisis.

Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History (Freud, Moses and Monotheism

definition

Opening this chapter, Caruth provides a general definition of trauma as an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed and, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena (11).

Caruth argues that we can begin to recognise the possibility of a history that is no longer straightforwardly referential, meaning that it is not based on simple models of experience and reference. She argues that through the notion of trauma, one can understand a rethinking of reference aimed not at eliminating history but at resituating it in our understanding, i.e., permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not (11)

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi