The Point Of Writing (About Trauma)

To seek reality is both to set out to explore the injury inflicted by it — to turn back on, and to try to penetrate, the state of being stricken, wounded by reality — and to attempt, at the same time, to reemerge from the paralysis of this state, to engage reality as an advent, a movement, and as a vital, critical necessity of moving on. It is beyond the shock of being stricken, but nonetheless within the wound and from within the woundedness that the event, incomprehensible though it may be, becomes accessible. The wound gives access to the darkness … To seek reality through language … is thus to make of one’s own ‘shelterlessness’ — of the openness and the accessibility to one’s own wounds — an unexpected and unprecedented means of accessing reality, the radical condition for a wrenching exploration of the testimonial function, and the testimonial power, of the language.

This quotation, about the poetics of Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Celan, embody Shoshana Felman’s theory of witnessing and testimony. It forcefully answers the question, What’s the point of writing?: that dead-endedness that anyone writing about trauma must invariably confront. According to the passage, language is important because it allows us to “access reality,” or the trauma it works on us, which releases us from it in turn. Penetrating trauma enables us to heal, “move on,” “reemerge from the paralysis of this state.” Felman, Teresa Brennan, Walter Benjamin, and W.H.R. Rivers all trust that language fosters transcendence.

What is the point of writing? For World War I poets, Rebecca West, and Rivers, it is to dredge reality (trauma) from euphemism, censorship, and repression. To plumb that trauma, bravely taking a measurement of its true depth. To create a text that catalyzes society into doing so.

No matter how it is understood or misunderstood, language transmits and persists, a monument to transmission. One cannot read the poems of Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen and emerge with faith in euphemism intact; West’s censored ‘cure’ and ‘return’ roil against themselves; and Rivers’s scientific evidence topples repression. These writers embitter the sugar-coat and stain the whitewash red with blood.

Simultaneously acknowledging its own inadequacy, literature highlights the inadequacies of obfuscating language. Whether literature pierces the linguistic veil to show what’s on the other side, as in Sassoon, Owen, Edmund Blunden, and for Rivers’s patients as well; or whether it slits just enough to see a small warning light flashing through, as in West, words pierce the veil.

Tupac said that without Vietnam war photographs, the American public would have

just thought everyone was dying valiantly in some beautiful way. But because we saw the horror, that’s what made us stop the Vietnam war. So I thought, that’s what I’m going to do as an artist, as a rapper: I’m going to show the most graphic details of what I see, of my community, and hopefully, they’ll stop. Quit.

Great War writers aspired to do the same. Exposing trauma, and the collectivity of that trauma, is ethical, painful, and the only way to stanch wounds. From Compton to Kensington, generations speak out to let a better life in.

As readers, listeners, and human beings, we are entrusted with the power of language. With it, will we accept responsibility for our fellows? Will we use it to cup life in justice and empathy — will we protect life? Or will we wield language like a toy gun, not realizing the live ammunition in its barrels? Literature presents the potential consequences to our actions but cannot dictate how we act. Instead, it cautions: Every word — every syllable — is a choice. Choose carefully.