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THE CONCEPT OFTRAUMAIN LITERATURE
VIEWED FROM THE TRANSITIONING MODELS OFTRAUMA
IN THE WEST
Dang Hoang Oanh*
Institute of Social Pedagogy – Vinh University,
182 Le Duan, Ben Thuy, Vinh, Viet Nam
Received 5 January 2021
Revised 10 April 2021; Accepted 23 July 2021
Abstract: The article analyzes and highlights the change in the view of trauma in the trauma
research trends in the United States and the West from the 90s of the 20th century to the present,
specifically through the case of Cathy Caruth and the waves of post-Caruthic research. By referring to
the trauma perspective of Cathy Caruth in classic work Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and
History and later studies, we show the shift from the traditional model (trauma as a structural concept)
to a pluralistic theoretical model where trauma is seen as a discourse. The article aims to provide a
complete, comprehensive conceptualization of trauma while also providing theoretical tools for reading
the text.
Keywords: trauma theory, Cathy Caruth, structural model, pluralism theory, trauma discourse
contributed to the birth development of this
1. Introduction*
branch of research, especially in the 90s of
the twentieth century. Inheriting the spirit of
Freud, Cathy Caruth and representatives of
the American Yale school created the first
wave in the construction of trauma theory in
the humanities. In particular, the treatise
Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative,
and History published in 1996 has gained
great popularity. Since then, trauma theory
begins to establish its connotation in the field
of research. Cathy Caruth raised the concept
of trauma in Trauma: Explorations in
Memory - a collection of trauma studies
analyzed from many perspectives and
contexts; however, only Unclaimed
Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and
History, Cathy Caruth gave a full definition
of trauma, carried out trauma analysis on
Since its inception, trauma theory
has experienced a very dynamic and exciting
development in the academic contexts of the
United States and Europe. Originating from
a term used in the medical field, identified
by a range of physical and neurological
symptoms, "trauma" has become
a
prominent concept in the humanities. The
original concept of trauma is associated with
the name of the psychoanalyst Freud, so
trauma theory is at its first stage in the
branch
of
psychoanalysis.
Freud's
conception of trauma and his discoveries of
the compulsive repetition of traumatic
experiences/events, the breakdown, and
fragmentation of the traumatic self,
* Corresponding author.
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literary and cinematic texts. Cathy Caruth's
work plays a very important role in the
dynamic context of trauma criticism,
especially since it has a role in the origin of
modern trauma theory. However, more than
two decades later, trauma research has
gradually taken a new turn. Following on
from the inspiration that Cathy Caruth had
initiated, later trauma theory, on the other
hand, sought many new directions of
expression. The model of trauma research
has also gradually changed, moving from
Cathy Caruth's classical model to a model of
pluralism theory. Michelle Balaev, in the
“Trauma Studies” chapter in the anthology
A companion to Literary Theory confirmed
the role of pluralism theory in the study of
trauma literature. It is also the view that
Roger Luckhurst once emphasized in
“Mixing memory and desire psychoanalysis,
psychology, and trauma theory”, in Literary
Theory and Criticism that trauma is
essentially multidisciplinary, and if anyone
wants to promote trauma to a high level, it is
necessary to replace the old model, joining
in forming new characteristics of the culture.
Thus, the focus of post-Caruthian trauma
criticism is to form a diversified view in
identifying the origins of trauma, from
which to see new aspects of this concept.
From the perspective of trauma as a
discourse, trauma criticism at this stage
delves into trauma discourses, interprets and
analyzes painful narrative questions on
issues of ethnicity, gender and sexual
trauma, such as Reading Rape stories:
Material Rhetoric and The Trauma of
Representation by Wendy S. Hesford, or the
guilt of Jewish identity, is expressed in
Amos Gordberg's Trauma, Narrative and
Two Forms of Death. From the reference of
the main points of Cathy's work to other
branches of post-Caruthian studies,
especially from a discursive perspective, we
will show the shift in the concept of trauma,
thereby discovering theoretical tools to
approach and interpret literary texts.
2. Aim and Scope
The purpose of this article is to
survey and analyze to see the shift and
change in the concept of trauma in the
discussion amongst modern Western critics
about trauma. From which, the article
proposes a relatively complete definition of
trauma. Two important questions discussed:
How is the concept of trauma understood?
How will the shift of trauma theory models
lead to a change in the understanding of
trauma? By answering these questions, the
paper attempts to construct a theoretical
framework of trauma in the literature. From
the theoretical framework outlined, we want
to experiment with a traumatic reading on
the literary text – a reading based on the
terms and analysis suggested by the theorists
of this movement.
We selected the classic text of
trauma criticism, Unclaimed Experience:
Trauma, Narrative, and History by Cathy
Caruth – the most widely cited author in
trauma research in the US and Europe. In
addition, we also examine the perspective of
trauma in critical texts by Michelle Balaev,
Roger Luckhust, Amos Gorlberg to see the
changing perspective on trauma of post-
Caruthian research trends. In addition, to
clarify theoretical issues, we use some
typical corpus of trauma literature, including
poetry, fiction and non-fiction prose.
3. Methods
As can be seen, Cathy Caruth's
trauma monograph is heavily influenced by
Freud's psychoanalytic theory, as Cathy
Caruth's rereading of Freud's psychoanalytic
texts
shows
ideological
continuity.
Therefore, approaching Caruth's trauma
theory from psychoanalytic terms is
appropriate because her trauma model
remains within the boundaries of
neurological trauma.
By the 1990s, the human experience
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of trauma was no longer the exclusive
subject of humanistic studies. Despite being
in the background of post-structuralism,
trauma theory rectified a point of theory in
the pre-1990s, when theorists focused only
on the realm of text and forgot about the fact
that literature was ultimately responsible,
linked to historical realities or had the
potential to provoke political breakdown.
That is why trauma theory is also associated
with subjects of being suppressed in life. For
example, it has been intertwined with
theories of gender, race, and environment.
Therefore, interdisciplinary, systematic and
comparative methods need to be used when
implementing the research objectives set out
in the article.
the subject. Its brutality is not fully
experienced at the moment of occurrence but
anchors in the unconscious, returns to haunt,
to torment people through fragments of
memories, nightmares, vague fears
repeatedly. The concept of Cathy Caruth
derives from Freud's psychoanalytic term
Nächtraglichkeit - understood as the belated
experience of trauma - "the concept
developed in his studies on hysteria and one
that refers to a non-chronological movement
of remembering involving a link between
two events; at
a
critical time of
psychological distress previously forgotten
memory traces return and are reworked or
re-interpreted to match subsequent events,
desires, and psychic developments" (Freud,
2004, as cited in Rodi-Risberg, 2010, p. 13).
So, going back to Freud's Moses and
Monotheism, Cathy Caruth noticed that
Moses was disguised as the legend of the
origins of the Jewish people. It is because
from the outset, the traumatic event is not
recognized, not known, "the traumatic
experience is an experience that is not fully
assimilated as it occurs " (Caruth, 1996, p. 5)
that the mechanism of pain is maintained.
Cathy Caruth calls that insidious
development the incubation period is the late
arrival (Latency). Trauma, in its most
essential sense, always accompanies the
Our goal, as stated above, is defining
a complete conception of trauma to
experiment with reading trauma in the
literary text. Thus the method of text
analysis (deep reading/perusing) is a method
used in this article.
4. Results
4.1. Cathy Caruth and the Traditional
Model
Cathy Caruth describes trauma as a
structural phenomenon. According to her,
trauma is understood in its most general
sense as "describing an overwhelming
experience of sudden or catastrophic events
in which the response to the event occurs in
the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive
appearance of hallucinations and other
intrusive phenomena” (Caruth, 1996, p. 11).
Earlier, in the introduction of Trauma:
Explorations in Memory, Caruth also
defined trauma as “the structure of its
experience”: "event that is not identified or
experienced in the past in a manner fullness,
which is subsequently re-occupied again in
the person experiencing it" (Caruth, 1995,
p. 4). As such, the core of the trauma remains
a shocking event. However, the event is not
immediately perceived and experienced by
unremembered,
unexpressed.
the
unknown,
the
Cathy Caruth's conception of trauma
is drawn from Freud's psychoanalytic ideas,
but her argumentation reveals points far
beyond its original core. In his
psychoanalytic work, Freud emphasized
"recurrence, the return of memory
(repetition compulsion). Freud suggested
that there is a mechanism that causes the
traumatic event to return, recur, and
transform through dreams. He calls it a way
to "master arousal recovery by developing
anxiety that the neglected/missed is the
cause of the nerve injury" (as cited in Balaev,
2018, p. 362). When recalled, the traumatic
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event is anchored in the person's
unconsciousness, thereby creating a sense of
fracture, the disintegration of the ego. It is
the fragmentation of the ontological self,
between the present "ego" on the one hand
and the past "ego" on the other hand. Even
so, sometimes remembering is just the tip of
the iceberg, and unremembering is really the
most important aspect of trauma. That view
is further developed in the theoretical
aspects that Caruth addresses in his treatises.
She argues that trauma "is not locatable in
the simple violent or original event in an
individual’s past, but rather in the way that
its very unassimilated nature – the way it
was precisely not known in the first instance
– returns to haunt the survivor later on"
(Caruth, 1996, p. 4). The unknown
(Knowing and Not Knowing) or the gaps of
memory is how memory operates an internal
defense mechanism - a "protective filter"
(Roger Luckhust) to keep people out of
injury. Exploring the psychoanalytic aspect
of trauma, Cathy Caruth places trauma at the
heart of important historical questions:
Which mechanisms, in addition to
neurological and psychological effects,
cause people to fail to remember? Or, put it
like Roger Luckhust, “Was the record of the
traumatic event lodged in the unconscious,
waiting for recall, or was it the very product
of that recall? Can we separate from what we
desire to remember?”(Luckhust, 2006, p.
501). These questions became a key aspect
of Cathy Caruth's defense of the
irrepresentability of trauma; and especially,
when viewing trauma as a cultural construct,
later branches of research have questioned to
the very end the mechanism by which people
are remembered and not remembered,
thereby tracing the way trauma occurs in
personal life.
completely resists verbal representation,
which means that we always recall that
knowledge but never identify it. Traumatic
experience
goes
beyond
ordinary
expression. This is Cathy Caruth's advanced
point and is also the core idea of her
theoretical system. In the chapter “The
wound and the voice”, she argues that
trauma always tries to avoid language
through camouflage mechanisms. When the
direct reference to the traumatic experience
slips (similar to how Tancred is unaware that
she unintentionally killed her lover -
Clorinda, during a duel in which she was
disguised under the armor of the rival
knight), its return via a nagging voice (as
Tancred thrust his sword into a tree, blood
gushed from the stab wound and a voice of
Clorinda lamented) gave a message about a
belated experience of trauma. Thus trauma
always creates double paradoxes in
consciousness and language. We want to
know the meaning of the past, but we cannot
understand it. On the one hand, we want to
tell the story about our own trauma, but on
the other hand, we are constrained by
linguistic
expressions.
The
human
experience of trauma seems impossible to
organize at the linguistic level. Because
trauma refuses to assimilate into memory in
the first place, it challenges the ability to
represent it in language. This idea of Caruth
is very close to the postmodern spirit.
Originally a social institution recognized in
the community's experience and traditions,
invisible language has become a kind of
strict censorship mechanism, a kind of
"dominating pressure on the entire spiritual
life." the spirit of the community,
dominating the personal discourse," causing
many things to settle into the unconscious, or
"repressed, inhibited, fell into a state of loss
of voice" (Tran, 2014, pp. 174-175). The
concept of the "social unconscious" -
proposed by E. Fromm - describes the
repression of powerful discourses in society
over discourses that are perceived as
Precisely because trauma is
unrecognizable at the outset, traumatic
experience challenges not only conventional
experiences but also reveals inherent
contradictions in language. Trauma
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"peripheral," or unorthodox. "Each society
allows only certain emotional thoughts to
reach the conscious level, while others only
exist in the unconscious state" (as cited in
Tran, 2014, pp. 174-175). After all, language
is but a sclerotic expression to experienced
life", thus, traumatizing and challenging the
direct linguistic representation.
of childhood. In the preface from the original
Vietnamese translation of the novel The Tin
Drum by writer Gunter Grass, poet Duong
Tuong once quoted philosopher Theodor W.
Adorno: "Writing a poem after Auschwitz1
is a barbaric act and so, nowadays, writing
poetry has become impossible" (as cited in
Grass, 2002, p. 5). In the above context, it is
clear that nothing is more capable of
revealing trauma than the inability of words.
Traumatic literature, from that point
of view, always requires the writer to break
the usual expressive structure of language.
Even because pain itself is elusive,
sometimes it can only be perceived through
things that are evoked, especially in the
suggestive language (the language of
dreams, the language of the subconscious),
or it will speak by the superposition of
symbols. The following excerpt from
Svetlana Alexievich's Last Witnesses: An
Oral History of the Children of World War
II is a prime example of how language, in
many cases, is powerless to write about the
pain of a child witnessing things beyond its
perceived threshold:
Or in Hunger Camp at Jaslo,
Wislawa Szymborska (n.d.) shows how
trauma can reveal language disturbances.
Here language slips away, and is elusive.
Whatever is eluded is not recorded in the
history. So “write it” but what to write when
trauma is something beyond common sense
and human perception. The poem's grasp of
trauma is thus almost a chase through its
cues.
Write it, write.
In ordinary ink
on ordinary paper:
they were given no food
they all died of hunger.
"All. How many?
It's a big meadow.
How much grass
for each one?"
Mama took off her kerchief and
covered my eyes with it... So we
reached our house, the place where
our house had stood several days
ago. The house wasn’t there. We
were met by our miraculously spared
cat. She pressed herself to me- that
was all. No one could speak...even
the cat didn’t meow. She was silent
for several days. Everybody became
mute. (Alexievich, 2019, p. 17)
Write: I don't know.
History counts its skeletons in round
numbers.
A thousand and one remains a
thousand,
The impression of little Katya's
silence most profoundly expresses the
traumatic state of man: the state of being
speechless. The terrible obsession with the
war in the eyes of a seven-year-old child can
only be expressed indirectly through the
image of a cat losing its squeal, through the
suffocating silence that enveloped the space
as though the one had never existed:
an imaginary embryo,
an empty cradle,
an ABC never read,
air that laughs, cries, grows,
1 A network of concentration camps built by the Nazis in Poland during World War II.
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emptiness running down steps
toward the garden,
it is something that can easily bury the
traumas of the community and personal.
Turning over a biblical myth, Freud
performed an act that Caruth calls
"questioning of history", "a tacit denial of
history":
nobody's place in the line
(Szymborska, n.d.)
Memory dissociation - the direct
cause of trauma - a perspective that helps
shape the concept of trauma across history is
also a factor in making it possible for
By replacing factual history with the
curious dynamics of trauma, Freud
would seem to have doubly denied
the possibility of historical reference:
first by himself actually replacing
historical fact with his own
speculations, and second, by
suggesting that historical memory, or
Jewish historical memory at least, is
always a matter of distortion, a
filtering of original event through the
fictions of traumatic repression,
which makes the event available at
best indirectly” (Caruth, 1996, p. 16).
individual
and
collective
traumatic
experiences to reconnect and to be together.
This argument proves that Cathy Caruth
went further than Freud when she saw the
link between individual trauma and
collective trauma. That is also why she
began to build her theoretical system
through rereading Moses and Monotheism in
Freud's psychoanalytic text.
Centering his story in the nature of
the
leaving,
and
returning,
constituted by trauma, Freud
resituates the very possibility of
history in the nature of a traumatic
departure. We might say, then, that
the central question, by which Freud
finally inquires into the relation
between history and its political
outcome, is: What does it mean,
precisely, for history to be the history
of a trauma? (Caruth, 1996, p. 15).
Traumatic experience is a latent
state, people cannot be fully aware of it.
Cathy Caruth calls the spiritual history of the
community a sort of "filtering" because
history is full of traumas that are "faded,"
buried, even disguised with another myth.
Thus, like personal trauma, historical trauma
can also be identified only through "the
inaccessibility of trauma as it occurs"
(Caruth).
Caruth
re-analyzed
Freud's
Because trauma is not only related to
individual memories, but it is also linked to
collective memories, the shocks and crises of
the community can be passed on from one
generation to the next in a very special way.
The spread of that sense of trauma can be
imagined as a disease that has metastasized
in the body: insidious, latent, and
speculative process to see how he viewed
history itself as a trauma, an encapsulation of
forms of violence by connecting Nazi
persecution of the Jews with historical roots
of his people. Like the formula "Moses
created the Jews," she argues, it is Freud's
way of deconsecrating the myth2 of Moses3
that reveals the meaningful nature of history:
2 The most important moment in Jewish history, according to Freud, was not the literal return to freedom but the
repression, the burial of a murder and its consequences, so all The barbaric violence in the Jewish history is
forced to repress as a kind of Oedipal mechanism. The Jewish community killed Moses to create their own god.
3
“In the biblical account, Moses was one of the captive Hebrews, who eventually arose as their leader and led
them out of Egypt back to Canaan” (Caruth, 1996, p. 13).
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spontaneous. What is remarkable about this
is that, while the narrator/storytellers may
not have to directly endure the horrific
events of the trauma, the obsession and
torment of other people's memories are
symbiotically persistent in the soul. World
literature records many cases; the trauma of
the community puts a code in personal
experience in which the author/narrator
establishes the pain and shame of the
ancestors, the community, of humanity as a
kind of self-identity. Natascha Wodin's She
Came from Mariupol, WG Sebald's The
Emigrants are such cases. In particular,
Natascha Wodin's She Came from Mariupol
is a synthesis of many emotions: the sense of
alienation of an exile, vague impressions
about the origin of parents, loneliness, and
guilt under the influence of community's
contempt. Whenever "I" think about her
origin, it is always painful: "who am I".
What's left is just two blurred black and
white photos of the mother, the marriage
certificate, and the employment card. "I"
delved into her past, traced back to my own
values, and rediscovered the life story of my
parents – Eastern European forced laborers
after World War II. The journey back to her
roots is also the journey of Natascha Wodin
being caught up in the history of her
compatriots and her people in a dark and
forgotten period.
of that - words dedicated to the life of
my mother, the mother who
disappeared somewhere in the
middle of nowhere, no name, no age,
a person who represents millions of
other people? (Wodin, 2020, pp. 36-37).
Thus, Cathy Caruth's definition of
trauma delves deeply into issues suggested
by Freud and Paul de Man's perspectives,
such as the late experience of trauma,
personal and historical trauma, slippage in
the meaning of trauma expressive language.
The process of "reading" and reinterpreting
literary, philosophical, or cinematic texts in
the light of trauma theory, on the one hand,
shows the operation of the "traditional
model" (used by Michelle Balaev) in many
contexts, on the other hand, provides
important hints about the intrinsic
relationship of individual experience and
culture, or warns of a potential return to
violence in the community.
4.2. Perspectives on Trauma From a
Discourse Perspective
Obviously, no theory is universal.
Cathy Caruth's theory itself is not without
limitations. After all, Cathy Caruth's trauma
theory was born on the basis of
poststructuralism, so it still sees trauma as
the source of the structure of its experience.
As a follower of Freud, she looked more
deeply into the symptoms, suggesting that
the inseparability of trauma is tied to
neurological function. That is why later
branches of research countered Caruth's
classical trauma model by "moving away
from a position that centralizes pathological
I was lost in the deep forest of world
history, deeper and deeper into the
terrible disasters of the 20th century.
Reports on forced labor during the
Third Reich are full of holes,
containing countless absurdities and
contradictions. The topic I want to
choose is slipping out of my hands, it
is becoming out of control that I
cannot handle. And, what can I say
no? Isn't it too late, I wonder if we
still have enough energy to handle
this massive pile of stuff? And in this
world, are there enough words for all
fragmentation..." to
"uncovers new
relationships between experience, language,
and knowledge that detail the social
significance of trauma" (Balaev, 2018, p. 366).
Indeed,
Cathy
Caruth's
profound
implications for trauma literature are
reminiscent of the role of literary discourse
in revealing the sound of wounds of the past.
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In asserting that literature is a form of
discourse in which knowing and not knowing
intersect, her book "has become an
and be acknowledged? There are traumatic
events that are, in fact, only recognized in
certain scenes as social events. For example,
there was a time when issues like sexual
assault (rape of women) were not considered
crimes. Judith Butler - philosopher, feminist
expert, in an interview, When Killing Women
isn't a Crime once said:
important
reference
point
in
the
development of the cultural trauma theory
(Luckhust, 2006, p. 502). Because the
mechanism that allows people to remember
and can't remember is always associated
with cultural construction. Scholars of the
era, before realizing the origins of 19th-
century railroad-related injuries, connected
trauma with cultural and historical contexts.
Considered a powerful symbol of science,
material civilization, and railway, the
railway trauma has created a violent tremor
in human reason, sowing insecurity and
breaking trust in the mechanical age. From
here, mental illness began to be recognized.
Essentially, "mental trauma not merely as a
by-product of the industrial era", but is also
"as a constitutive phenomenon that has
shaped the structure of its cultural discourse"
(Ataria et al., 2016, p. 16). From a cultural
construct, post-Caruthian trauma criticism
studies trauma as a discourse: what is
remembered and what is not; what is
acceptable and what is excluded.
Foucault's discourse theory has mentioned
power and knowledge and the organic
relationship of these two concepts. "The
Western philosophical tradition primarily
sees power in the role of repression. When
writing Discipline and Punish - 1975 and
especially in The History of Sexuality,
Volume 1 (1976) Foucault develops a new
perspective, emphasizing the positive
aspect: power as a constructive mechanism
is productive rather than prohibitive in the
activity of knowledge creation" (Tran,
2015). Looking at trauma theory, here comes
a problem: clearly, not in every context,
human trauma is recognized. It is the turning
point in the discourse that forces people to
raise questions: Under what conditions is
human experience considered traumatic?
When can people cry for their own pain?
When will loss, pain be named, be present,
In so many places, the violence done
to women, including murder, are not
even conceptualized as crimes. They
are “the way of the world” or “acts of
passion” and these phrases disclose
deep-seated attitudes that have
naturalized violence against women,
that is, made it seem as if this
violence is a natural or normal part of
ordinary life... (The New York
Times, 2019).
It is the social norms that tolerate
gender-based violence. It is the principle of
the community that becomes a mechanism
of trauma. Therefore, in addition to the
structure of the traumatic experience, trauma
criticism must also pay attention to the "petit
narrative" voice, listening to the "wailing
sounds" of small people who have never
counted in history. Michelle Balaev has
clearly contributed a way of understanding,
arguing that the concept of trauma is in itself
critical. It criticizes community norms that
cause suffering to women, slavery, people of
LGBT. For example, Reading Rape stories:
Material Rhetoric and The Trauma of
Representation by Wendy S. Hesford is a
powerful social critic. In that article,
Hesford,
through
analyzing
an
autobiographical documentary by Margie
Strosser - an American filmmaker and rape
survivor, has demonstrated how powerful
feminist voices are when a woman confronts
and recreates pain. Rape stories is a special
case study because it tells an imaginary
revenge story. The film traces ten years of
Margie Strosser's grappling with the
traumatic experience of being raped,
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including nightmares, phobias, avoidance of
men, and agoraphobia, etc., all the
syndromes of rape trauma - and ends with a
vengeful fantasy in which Strosser portrays
the rapist as the victim and herself as the
victor. According to Wendy S. Hesford,
"This fantasy is a vivid example of how
survivors translate private pain into public
memory through the appropriation and
reversal of culturally dominant rape scripts
that presume women's passivity and
helplessness and that women want to be
raped" (Hesford, 1999, pp. 192-193). Truly
reflects the title of the article, Rhetorical
Material and the Trauma of Expression,
Wendy S. Hesford has clarified two issues.
First, Strosser's documentary's message is
powerful and challenging, offering a
completely different perspective about the
victims, as well as the aftershocks they've
been through. Apparently, there were once
dominant ideas that women wanted to be
raped or that victims were seen as powerless
agents of aggression and anger. Gender
inequality leads scholars (academic
perspectives) to resist the pain of women and
their stories. So Margie Strosser's visual
story is a rhetorical strategy as she uses her
own memories and body to recount the
traumatic experience, as well as the painful
consequences it brings. Margie Strosser's
story may "participate in the feminist
proclamation of survivor discourse as a
political act against violence - a conception
of the personal prevalent in early feminist
literature on violence and consciousness-
backdrop, in which rape is rationalized, how
rapists exercise "body power." Since then,
Wendy's article also suggests larger issues,
such as cultural stories about gender, race,
class, sexuality... that can be linked through
historical analyzes of rape trauma and its
expression.
Looking deeply into trauma
discourse, one can clearly see traces of
marginalization of non-centered values that
are subject to violent repression. Trauma
criticism is concerned with philosophical
perspectives on violence. However, besides
the visible violence that provokes historical
storms, distorts the lives of each individual,
there is also an invisible brutality that is
more subtle, more delicate, but equally
inimical. It is violence that is tacitly
acknowledged, legitimized by social norms,
disguised by stereotypes and ideals. Not only
in times of war, or in the tumult of history,
but even in everyday life, humans have
become negligible, vulnerable to the
mechanisms that cause pain. What lies
default and acceptable in social life4 turns
out to contain a multitude of traumatic
factors that are very subtly pernicious. The
abuse of power by the totalitarian model in
strict contexts, gender inequality and the
authority of patriarchy, the potency of
crowds and mechanisms, etc., have
engendered all kinds of pressures to push
children, people in miserable and tormented
situations. In recent decades, literature has
come increasingly closer to micro-
narratives,
marginalities,
individuals
raising
groups
wherein
women's
different from the crowd, and society.
autobiographical stories were positioned as
authenticating truths" (Hesford, 1999, p. 195).
Second, through Rape Stories, Wendy S.
Hesford shows how to overthrow the
dominant culture with strong patriarchal
accents. She shows a kind of power
discourse that exists as a pop-culture
Han Kang's The Vegetarian - the
2016 Man Booker Prize-winning novel - is a
work that penetrates deep into the tragedy of
everyday life, the mishap of people who are
considered "outcast". It is also a text that
makes readers realize that there are
4
Interestingly enough, the word “normal” is derived from the word “norm” which means rule. As a rule, it is
always repressive.
VNU JOURNAL OF FOREIGN STUDIES, VOL. 37, NO. 4 (2021)
106
mechanisms in life that, once people are put
into a traumatic situation, they will suffer
from persistent traumatic experiences. The
Vegetarian consists of 3 independent stories
(Vegetarian, Mongolian mark, Flaming
Trees), but intersects - connects each other
from an unusual event: suddenly one day,
Yeong Hye - an ordinary woman often leads
a normal, even somewhat boring life,
waking up from a dream and determined
never to eat meat again. Her decision to be
considered "unusual" has disturbed family
life and affected the lives of her loved ones.
and over again) have pushed Yeong Hye into
a state of almost losing her voice, being
helpless and bewildered before the
nightmares that lasted forever.
From the initial confusion, to shock,
anger, Yeong Hye became a grotesque and
monstrous image in the perception of those
around her. For family members, Yeong
Hye's act of completely refusing to eat meat
is almost an absurdity. The state of extreme
tension that took place during the family
meal and the actions of loved ones have
directly poured on Yeong Hye a cruel
pressure. Parents, older sister, and brother
were only interested in putting a piece of
meat into her mouth, finding all kinds of
methods, from coaxing advice to using
violence to control, pushed Yeong Hye to
the path of destruction of her own existence.
In the end, in the fierce resistance, Yeong
Hye refused food, stopped communicating,
thinking, and dried herself in the sun hoping
to become a tree, because to her, all the trees
in this world are all brothers and sisters. Of
course, Yeong Hye cannot turn into a tree,
but her monstrously desiccated body shrank
to be a completely alone figure, absence
from any connection to the social life.
The in-depth analysis of the feelings
and reactions of people around to Yeong
Hye's behaviour, Han Kang reveals that
there is non-verbal violence, prejudices, and
insensitive attitudes towards feelings of
others has formed a series of mechanisms
that push people into a state of loss for
words, becoming depressed and lonely.
Those mechanisms can be disguised under
the "normal, boring" relationships of
married life (the husband), the care and
concern of the mother and sister under the
shadow of authority of a father in the society
still heavily pervaded by patriarchy. The
husband's initial confusion, both surprise
and awe, towards his wife, which he
considers "neither freshness nor charm or
anything especially refined", even "that kind
of wife, and that kind of lifestyle, did mean
that I was unlikely to find my days
particularly stimulating" has made Yeong
Hye to become a "spectre" in her house. In
his eyes, the wife gradually became a
monstrous figure, gradually, the feeling of
doubt formed "an intense feeling of disgust"
(Kang, 2015, p. 34). Even when he saw his
wife having hard sleeps, suffering from
tormented corporal pain after every dream,
he still only saw the desiccated body of a
silly woman with the dark abyss in her head.
The emotional and lifestyle disparity, the
husband's indifference, even the desperate
unanswered verbal signals (Yeong Hye
repeated the sentence "I had a dream" over
To say that traumatic experience is
the psychological dimension associated with
suffering also somewhat holds true in the
case of the character Yeong Hye, but that is
not all. Han Kang's novels show one thing: a
violent event can manifest itself as
something that is completely unknown to us.
For Yeong Hye, violence is initially
unknown, unrecognizable, but it is the
mechanism of action that causes forms of
trauma to be present. There are things that,
in essence, have caused a long-lasting
trauma in childhood, such as: the brutal
beatings of the father, the witness of the
father brutally killing the dog that once bit
him, etc., in the perception of a nine-year-old
child, they are not yet significant events.
Even in her memory, Yeong Hye was
completely a carefree child, "the smell of
VNU JOURNAL OF FOREIGN STUDIES, VOL. 37, NO. 4 (2021)
107
a
burnt flesh, which the perilla seeds couldn’t
wholly mask, pricked my nose. I remember
the two eyes that had watched me, while the
dog was made to run on, while he vomited
blood mixed with froth, and how later they
had seemed to appear flickering, on the
surface of the soup. But I don’t care. I really
didn’t care" (Kang, 2015, p. 33). However,
once the memory returned through the
nightly, tormenting dreams that left her dull
and exhausted, then the trauma emerged.
The dreams were always permeated with
blood, scarlet one, locking her in a
"shuddering, sordid, gruesome, brutal
feeling" (Kang, 2015, p. 23). It was the
moment that Yeong Hye realized that all the
states she endured turned out to be horribly
traumatic. From dreams full of violence and
murder that reveal childhood memories, to a
state of faltering, voiceless, broken
existence, completely solitary and failed to
capture the present moment, everything is
related. In The Vegetarian, Yeong Hye is
almost a traumatized image.
in the most ordinary life.
Approaching trauma from
discursive perspective not only widens the
boundaries of a structural problem, but it
also opens up possibilities for strong
connections with contemporary theory. If we
look more deeply at the human aspect that
trauma theory brings, in particular, focus on
the psychological problems of traumatized
subjects evoked by critical trauma discourse,
we realize that Trauma theory is likely
connected with one of the most prominent
theoretical today, that is the theory of
emotions (Affect Theory). In fact, modern
trauma criticism focuses its attention on the
persistent effects suffered by the traumatic
subject and rather than the initial traumatic
event. Insecurity, anxiety, guilt about race,
skin color, gender, etc., are the factors that
destroy ego values and are the factors
causing the most trenchant wound. For
example, Amos Gordberg in Trauma,
Narrative and Two forms of Death describes
this situation, and it shows the inhumanity of
the development of Nazism in allowing
racial guilt to slowly destroy Jewish hope.
Amos Gordberg pointed out that when the
Nazis marked each Jew with a body badge or
had a number tattooed on his arm, the victim
was approaching his first Death. He called it
"The Death Caused by the Annihilator’s
Signifier" or "symbolic death". He wrote:
Han Kang's The Vegetarian is a text
that we chose to analyze to clarify a specific
traumatic state that comes from people's
existential situations in life, thereby to show
that: very subtle networks of power
structures that can push people into a state of
misery, pain, and especially, not all human
pain can be named and seen. In Yeong Hye,
there are many factors that make her easy to
become a victim of many oppressive
mechanisms in life: being a woman, having
a history of abuse, being a very ordinary
woman with a boring married life. Yeong
Hye symbolizes the type of person who is
easily forgotten in this life, as well as easily
became a subject of ignorance in the eyes of
others. Therefore, Yeong Hye's cries and
protests against eating meat are inevitably
considered irrational by her relatives and the
community; her painful dreams meant
nothing in her husband's eyes. So, in the
absence of inhuman actions or bloody
violence, people can still experience trauma
What I am proposing is that the Nazi
practices of signification endeavored
to literally close the gap between the
signifier, the signified, and the real
referent: a Jew as a signifier is a Jew
as a concept is a Jew as a real
material body. Within the framework
of such a practice, there are no gaps
between the subject and the signifier
and between one signifier and
another since the Jew has only one
signifier. Total identity is reached"
(Gordberg, 2006, p. 132).
VNU JOURNAL OF FOREIGN STUDIES, VOL. 37, NO. 4 (2021)
108
The Jew no longer exists in his being
as a self but is "dissolved" in his community,
a community marked, despised, murdered.
In Amos Goldberg's article, there is an idea
that is very close to Freud's point, which is:
from the beginning, the event is not entirely
traumatic. In other words, the classification
of the Nazis was done in many ways: a badge
attached to a person, a "J" stamped on a
passport, a number tattooed on the skin of
Jews... From eyewitness recollections, it was
indeed a horribly traumatic experience.
poststructuralism, so her definition provided
a classical model of trauma. The later
development direction of trauma criticism,
when it transcends the structure of
experience and memory towards a pluralistic
model, actually develops in the direction of
contemporary theory: engagement, taking
responsibility for life. It focuses on human
existential issues, delves into the
mechanisms that cause trauma in social life,
questions and critiques social norms. The
change of trauma model, from our
perspective, is completely consistent with
the trend of the theory's transformation.
Trauma criticism gradually moved away
from its central domain of Western
sensibilities and identity, and more closely to
many peripheral cultures, which contributed
to expanding the database of case studies,
where trauma theory was placed in the
extremely vivid and rich literary life.
Let us take, for example, Victor
Klemperer’s testimony as he wrote it
in Dresden immediately after the war
(Klemperer survived the war in
Dresden and was not deported to the
“East”):" I ask myself today what I
had been asking myself and many
different others already hundreds of
times: what was the most difficult
day for the Jews in the twelve years
of hell. Never did I receive from
myself or from others, any other
answer but that: September the 19th
1941. The day when we were forced
to wear the Jewish star (Gordberg,
2006, p. 127).
By adopting Cathy Caruth's
conceptions of trauma combined with the
discourse of contemporary trauma criticism,
we believe that trauma first and foremost, in
the most general sense, is mental distress,
and pain - the inner experiences of people in
the face of sudden, terrible events, whereby
the transcendent nature of the event pushes
people into a state of unawareness of the
nature of trauma at the very first moment.
Therefore, trauma is only recognized in the
process of recall, in the chain of memories
anchored in the depths of the human
unconscious. Second, the core of trauma is
still the events. However, the boundary of
traumatic events’ significance should be
The word "Jewish" is attached to
individuals, becoming a kind of shackles,
depriving them of their freedom, making
them lose their voice, their sense of self-
existence, and being tortured, completely
destroyed. Indeed, in studies of emotion
theory, we can find many intersections with
trauma criticism, and in critical trauma
writing it is not difficult to see traces of
gender discourses, race. In that tangled web,
at the heart of it, all remains a trauma that
describes human suffering and how people
respond to that situation.
widened.
If
only
narrowing
the
understanding in a single sense, thinking that
traumatic events are debacles that occur in
human life (war, disaster), inadvertently, a
part of literature written about violence in
everyday life will be excluded from the flow
of trauma literature. Traumatic events can
also cover diverse manifestations of
repressive mechanisms in everyday life,
making trauma more recognizable through
5. Conclusion
As we have shown above, Cathy
Caruth's trauma theory derived from
VNU JOURNAL OF FOREIGN STUDIES, VOL. 37, NO. 4 (2021)
109
Grass, G. (2002). Cái trống thiếc [The tin drum]
(Dương Tường dịch). Nhà xuất bản Hội nhà
văn.
the aftershocks of the crisis of the self.
Finally, trauma works by mechanisms of the
unconscious. The initial pain, obsession, and
overwhelm is not really trauma until, at a
very distant point in time, unconsciously
activates the pain mechanism, disturbing the
psychological life, bursting into inner crises,
causing severe mental sequelae. Trauma,
thereby creating dissociation, fracture in
consciousness, even pushing people to the
limit of endurance: loss of voice, madness,
silence, sleepwalking, etc.
Hesford, W. S. (1999). Reading Rape stories:
Material rhetoric and the trauma of
representation. College English, 62(2), 192-221.
Kang, H. (2015). The Vegetarian. Portobello Books.
Luckhurst, R. (2006). Mixing memory and desire
psychoanalysis, psychology, and trauma
theory. In P. Waugh (Ed.), Literary theory
and criticism: An Oxford guide (pp. 497-507).
Oxford University Press.
Rodi-Risberg, M. (2010). Writing trauma, writing
time and space: Jane Smiley’s A Thousand
Acres and the Lear group of father-daughter
incest narratives. University of Vaasa.
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Trần, Đ. S. (2014). Trên đường biên của lí luận văn
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diễn ngôn của F. Foucault và nghiên cứu văn
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narrative, and history. John Hopkins
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VNU JOURNAL OF FOREIGN STUDIES, VOL. 37, NO. 4 (2021)
110
KHÁI NIỆM CHẤN THƯƠNG TRONG VĂN HỌC
NHÌN TỪ SỰ CHUYỂN DỊCH CÁC MÔ HÌNH CHẤN THƯƠNG
Ở PHƯƠNG TÂY
Đặng Hoàng Oanh
Viện Sư phạm Xã hội, Trường Đại học Vinh,
182 Lê Duẩn, Bến Thủy, Vinh, Việt Nam
Tóm tắt: Bài viết đi vào phân tích làm nổi bật sự thay đổi trong cách nhìn về chấn thương của
các khuynh hướng nghiên cứu chấn thương ở Hoa Kì và phương Tây giai đoạn những năm 90 của thế
kỉ XX cho đến nay, cụ thể qua trường hợp Cathy Caruth và những làn sóng nghiên cứu hậu Caruth. Qua
việc tham chiếu quan điểm về chấn thương trong công trình kinh điển của Cathy Caruth Unclaimed
Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History và các công trình nghiên cứu sau này, chúng tôi chỉ rõ sự
chuyển dịch từ mô hình truyền thống (chấn thương được nhìn như một khái niệm mang tính cấu trúc)
sang mô hình lí thuyết đa nguyên, nơi chấn thương được nhìn như một diễn ngôn. Những nghiên cứu
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Từ khóa: lí thuyết chấn thương, Cathy Caruth, mô hình cấu trúc, lí thuyết đa nguyên, diễn ngôn
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