Abstract
How individuals and societies cope with the aftermath of events which they experienced as traumatic has attracted ever-increasing academic and media attention in ‘Western society’s ongoing obsession with catastrophe, victimization, and memorialization’.1 Within trauma theory it has become commonplace to emphasise the temporal structure of post-traumatic psychopathology: ‘the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly’.2 The sudden irruption of an unanticipatable, threatening situation necessarily finds the individual unprepared, inducing fear, helplessness and bewilderment. Immediate defence mechanisms may include dissociative symptoms such as numbing, detachment, derealisation or depersonalisation. Subsequently, dissociation or repression may lead to amnesia and/or conversion disorders (such as psychogenic paralyses and anaesthesia), or, conversely, to intrusive memories.3 In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) Freud attributed traumatic neurosis to an extensive breach in the mind’s protective shield against stimuli; hence, dreams in which the traumatic situation is compulsively repeated attempt ‘to master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis’, thus permitting it to be grasped affectively and cognitively.4
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Notes
Paul Lerner and Mark S. Micale, ‘Trauma, Psychiatry, and History: A Conceptual and Historiographical Introduction’, in Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930, ed. Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner (Cambridge, 2001 ), 3.
Cathy Caruth, ‘Introduction’, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, 1995), 4.
Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols, XVIII (1955), 1–64; 32.
Pat Barker, Another World [1998] (1999), 83.
Sheryl Stevenson, ‘With the Listener in Mind’, in Critical Perspectives on Pat Barker, ed. Sharon Monteith, Margaretta Jolly, Nahem Yousaf and Ronald Paul (Columbia, SC, 2005 ), 175, 178
Caroline Garland, ‘Conversation between Pat Barker and Caroline Garland’, Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 77 (2004) 185–99; 186–8.
Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I [1979] (Cambridge, 1981), 164.
See Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves [2000] (Cambridge, MA, 2001 ), 86–7.
Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (1990), x. On Barker’s negotiation of belatedness, see John Brannigan, Pat Barker (Manchester, 2005), 96–100
Mark Rawlinson, Pat Barker (Houndmills, 2010), 65–8
Karen Patrick Knutsen, Reciprocal Haunting: Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy (Münster, 2010), passim.
Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation [1976] (1979), 21.
Volker Hage, ‘Volker Hage im Gespräch mit W.G. Sebald’, Akzente, 50.1 (2003) 35–50; 36. This and subsequent unattributed translations from German are mine.
W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York, 2004 ), 10.
Anne Fuchs, ‘Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte’. Zur Poetik der Erinnerung in W.G. Sebalds Prosa (Cologne, 2004), 155. Graham Jackman summarises successive German postwar attitudes to the Third Reich in ‘Introduction’, German Life and Letters, 57.4 (2004) 343–7.
W.G. Sebald, Nach der Natur. Ein Elementargedicht (Nördlingen, 1988 ), 73–7.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, 1999 ), 461.
W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York, [1998] 1999 ), 3.
On Sebald and modernity, see Amir Eshel, ‘Against the Power of Time: The Poetics of Suspension in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz’, New German Critique, 88 (Winter 2003) 71–96; 83–91.
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© 2011 Alan David Robinson
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Robinson, A. (2011). After the Event. In: Narrating the Past. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230316744_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230316744_7
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