Excerpt
From the book
One way of responding to these and other concerns about the terrible difficulties of representing trauma is to call for silence. The call to silence after catastrophe can be a way of respecting, even hallowing. To treat the disaster as unspeakable is to treat it as beyond, as transcendent; the lexicon of such accounts often shadows the divine. For children of Holocaust survivors, Hoffman writes, the rhetoric of the unfathomable and the unspeakable “echoes a childhood sense of an incomprehensible cosmos, of sacred or demonic forces.” It is, finally, a “rhetoric of awe,” an “unintentional sacralrization.” Maurice Blanchot, who lived in France during the Nazi occupation, writes of the disaster: “But the danger (here) of words in their rhetorical insignificance is perhaps that they claim to evoke the annihilation where all sinks always, without hearing the ‘be silent’ addressed to those who have known only partially, or from a distance the interruption of history.”
For some, however, this rhetoric of mystery is not only, or not always, a way of hallowing. It can also be a way of ignoring. Yehuda Bauer critiques this approach to the Holocaust as an “elegant form of escapism.” Dominick LaCapra warns that the impulse toward “sacralization” is also an impulse toward “silent awe” ; and Alvin Rosenfeld declares: “If it is a blasphemy, then, to attempt to write about the Holocaust, and an injustice against the victims, how much greater the injustice and more terrible the blasphemy to remain silent.” Discussing Rwanda, Philip Gourevitch explains: “The language that’s used most frequently in the popular response to something like Rwanda are words like unspeakable, unthinkable, unimaginable. And [in the case of Rwanda] those all struck me as words that ultimately were telling you not to speak, think, or understand, that they basically are words that get you off the hook and then in a sense give you license for both kinds of ignorance—literal ignorance, not knowing, and ignoring.”
Those who favor the idea of trauma’s unspeakability despite such critiques often do so because they have an implicit ethical commitment to the idea that the survivor’s experience is unutterably unique. If the trauma is literally untranslatable, then it can belong only to the individual. It is irreducibly personal; it cannot be reduced to a version of the common. To adopt such a stance is to adopt a stance of care toward the survivor. But as many critics have pointed out, in the more extreme versions of such theoretical models, unspeakability and untranslatability can begin to function like undifferentiated and impersonal universals. Trauma increasingly seems less like a singular event in an individual life than a concept of event that transcends individual life. Trauma becomes a common pathological structure of experience. It is what it is independently of political context, cultural history, family background, life experiences, and individual psychic makeup and therapeutic labor. Trauma is external to the individual, impenetrable by the individual. It therefore belongs to no one, and can be transmitted across individuals and even generations. As one concerned critic writes: this way of thinking about trauma presents as a value “the unknowable particularity of the traumatic experience” but in the end “makes particularity meaningless and makes trauma available to anyone, not just without recourse to painful experience but without recourse to experience as such.” For some, this is to diminish rather than to preserve.