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Trauma and Narrative
There are several very different ways in which the relationship between "trauma" and "narrative" (or "life narrative") is articulated.1 Some scholars think that these two concepts are opposites-stories are a mode of symbolic structure that constructs identity, while trauma is the effect of that which evades structure and shatters identity. Many attribute such an understanding to Freud, such as Cathy Caruth's approach to the relationship between trauma and the historical narrative.2 These approaches stress mostly the discrepancies between the repetitive and belated temporal structure of the trauma versus the linear temporal structure of the narrative.
Others claim that trauma and the stories that are told by the traumatized victim often bear consequential, or at times even therapeutic, relations: a traumatic experience produces an immediate need to tell a story and to reformulate one's life story. Some, such as the psychiatrist Judith Herman or Primo Levi, would even say that a life story is the first essential step toward recovery, or at least toward working through the trauma.3 A third form of relation is enactment: the trauma narrative, in its form and mode of narration, reenacts the original traumatic event. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's work on Günter Grass's Cat and Mouse is a good example of such analysis.4
As a matter of fact, these three conceptual relationships between trauma and narrative do not necessarily exclude one another. In many instances, we can find them all, with changing emphases, in various writings on trauma. One example of this complex articulation is the work of Dominick LaCapra, who stresses the unavoidable oscillation between exclusion, working through, and acting out in representing trauma.5
In this paper, however, I would like to suggest yet another way to relate these two concepts to each other, recombining elements of the approaches mentioned above. I would like to suggest that in the case of a vast traumatic event, such as the Holocaust (but certainly not only the Holocaust), stories that are narrated by the victims are the place where trauma is "framed" so that it will not collapse into two very much more radical forms of death-the death of the victim subject by the annihilator's signifier and the victim's "symbolic death."6
These two forms of death refer, as will be discussed later,...