Holocaust Memorial

Restoring God as Witness Through Literature

Lament, Bodily Memory, & Literature post #2

We previously addressed literature and a theology of lament as a way of embodying trauma in order to uncover wounds. Here, we will be describing the nature of traumatic memory as a split between the body and consciousness, and relationships with God and others, and the role of literature in bridging that gap. In doing so, we are again confronted with the paradox of writing about trauma, which defies language, and wrestle with the incomprehensible nature of trauma and witness as a necessary component of healing.

A number of theorists have written about the effects of trauma on the body, and how pervasive they can be long after the traumatic event is experienced.¹ Levine argues that our bodies unconsciously remember trauma. Bodily trauma is thus suffered in the psyche as a breakdown of consciousness.² As they occur, traumatic experiences cannot be processed and integrated into our existing schemas in the same way as other experiences can.³ This lack of integration is at the root of the split between the body and the mind.

The process of integration parallels the theological process of witnessing.⁴ Dori Laub provides an example of unintegrated trauma in his description of the “collapse of witnessing”⁵ during the Holocaust. While many could have witnessed the event, no one was truly successful in bearing witness while the event was unfolding because humanity did not have the “cognitive capacity to perceive and to assimilate the totality of what was really happening at the time.”⁶

Why do unconscious traumatic memories keep affecting us in the present?⁷ Cathy Caruth⁸ argues that the body is attempting to reconcile the enormity of what happened with the fact that it has somehow survived it. Due to lack of both integration and witnessing, trauma remains “trapped” in the body and must be released.⁹ For healing to occur, people need to be brought back to the state they were in when the traumatic memory was first encoded, which can occur through the creative act of testimony writing.¹⁰ Laub argues “the survivors [of the Holocaust] did not only need to survive so that they could tell their stories; they also needed to tell their stories in order to survive.”¹¹

Integration and witnessing, however, do not imply understanding, as it is impossible to fully understand trauma.¹² This is also what Patterson argues in his theological discussion of the nature of God in relation to Holocaust testimonies; and,¹³ as O’Connor points out, Lamentations also does not provide an explanation for trauma. Indeed, according to Cathy Caruth¹⁴ one of the core components of traumatic memory is incomprehensibility. Paradoxically, failure to understand can act as “a way of gaining access to a knowledge that has not yet attained the form of ‘narrative memory’. In its active resistance to the platitudes of knowledge, this refusal opens up the space for a testimony that can speak beyond what is already understood.”¹⁵

Furthermore, testimony defies solitude in reaching out to others through sharing experiences.¹⁶ The process of sharing and witnessing trauma through literature allows people to bond in the mutual experience of incomprehensibility.¹⁷ This mutuality is an important component of I-Thou connections between humans, and with the divine.¹⁸

Patterson argues that the trauma of the Holocaust resulted in disconnection, loss of meaning, as well as loss of life through indifference of humanity and God, who have failed as witnesses. He further argues that testimony literature is a way of defying this silence: through writing about their trauma experiences, Holocaust survivors fight back against “the illness of indifference”¹⁹ and incomprehensibility.²⁰ Survivors were thus able to keep their memory alive, and therefore keep God alive. In this sense, we can shift the emphasis in our study of Lamentations from God’s silence to the victims’ cries, and Daughter Zion as an active participant in bringing God back to life. Healing is an embodied process that involves an active protest, a cry into silence, which both acknowledges and defies divine silence, and therefore keeps memory, tradition, and relationships alive.

Literature is an integrative embodied process that can repair the divide of body and mind. It is also a process of witnessing that restores connections with others and with the divine. Because trauma involves not only a disconnection between the body and consciousness, but also a rupture of capacity for human connection, literature becomes a point of contact through which we can allow ourselves to be impacted by the story of another. In acting as a bridge between body and mind, between self and others, and between humanity and God, testimony literature involves an active process of keeping memories, experiences, and relationships alive, and thus counters the pervasiveness of death in the midst of post-traumatic survival.²¹

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1. For example, according to Scaer, traumatized patients tend to re-enact their trauma, a process, which is “rooted in unconscious biochemical systems of the brain” [Robert C. Scaer, The Body Bears the Burden: Trauma, Dissociation, and Disease (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), 120].
2. “What causes trauma, then, is a shock that appears to work very much like a bodily threat but is in fact a break in the mind’s experience of time” [Cathy Caruth Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2016), 63]; Shelly Rambo, Resurrecting Wounds: Living in the Afterlife of Trauma (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2017).
3. Because trauma is precisely “the confrontation with an event that, in its unexpectedness or horror, cannot be placed within the schemes of prior knowledge — that cannot, as George Bataille says, become a matter of ‘intelligence’ — and thus continually returns, in its exactness, at a later time” [Cathy Caruth, “Introduction to Part II,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1995), 153].
4. Shelly Rambo, Spirit & Trauma: A Theology of Remaining (Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, KY: 2010).
5. Dori Laub, “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1995), 65.
6. Ibid., 69.
7. Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past: the Flexibility of memory and the engraving of trauma,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1995), 163.
8. Cathy Caruth Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2016), 107.
9. Peter A. Levine, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2010).
10. van der Kolk and van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past: the Flexibility of memory and the engraving of trauma,” 175.
11. Laub, “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle,” 64; Indeed, in his studies of Holocaust survivors, Krystal found that the prognosis was far better for those who were “endowed with literary or artistic talents that permitted them to develop or reconstruct damaged functions” [Henry Krystal, “Trauma and Aging: A Thirty-Year Follow Up,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1995), 97].
12. “This is what I called the obscenity of the project of understanding — and more than this, it is not only obscenity, it is real cowardice, because this idea of our being able to engender harmoniously, if I may say so again, this violence, is just an absurd dream of nonviolence. It is a way of escaping; it is a way not to face the horrors” [Claude Lanzmann, “The Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening with Claude Lanzmann,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1995), 207].
13. “The effort to know what it was like or how it felt does not bring anyone one whit closer to the process of a recovery of Jewish being and the sanctification of Jewish life. One may wince at every one of the twenty-five blows suffered by the victim; one may gaze into the mirror of the memoir and struggle to picture oneself cold and emaciated; one may weep at every description of mothers calming their children as they are forced into the gas chambers. But this brings one no nearer to the essence of the memory and the recovery it seeks” [David Patterson, Sun Turned to Darkness: Memory and Recovery in the Holocaust Memoir (Syracuse. NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998), 11].
14. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 66.
15. Cathy Caruth, “Introduction to Part II,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1995), 155; Cathy Caruth emphasizes the importance of literary language in communicating experiences of trauma and compares literature to mathematical formulas, arguing that its function is not to provide answers or somehow make sense of the trauma, but rather to give us an equation and structure to work from (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 5). Lament can serve a similar function. To enter it to a state of grief and the process of lament, one is able to express and embody trauma, even in its refusal to understand the experience itself [Kathleen O’Connor, Lamentations & The Tears of the World (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002)].
16. Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1995), 15; O’Connor discusses the ability of Lament to connect us to the suffering of the collective so that the trauma is no longer the burden of a single person to bear (O’Connor, Lamentations & The Tears of the World).
17. For example, in the film Hiroshima Mon Amour, two lovers come to be able to speak and listen to each other’s trauma in meaningful encounters, which rely in large part on “what they do not fully know in their own traumatic pasts” (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 58). When the Japanese lover claims that the French woman has seen nothing of Hiroshima, the woman replies that she has seen everything: “Between the man’s ‘nothing’ and the woman’s ‘everything’ is not, then, simply an opposition about what she does or does not see of Hiroshima, but the coming together of two absolute claims to faithfulness” (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 35). The film emphasizes that we cannot fully know or understand and how this incomprehension is exactly what allows for the witnessing another’s narrative/trauma and, then, bring individuals together through a mutual experience.
18. Patterson, Sun Turned to Darkness.
19. Ibid., 104.
20. “If the Holocaust memoir is against silence, it is against the silence of God; if it is about the recovery of human life, it is also about the recovery of the life of the divine. In the memory of God’s silence that silence takes on a voice heard in the memory’s act of response. God speaks despite Himself. He speaks because the Jew will not allow Him to be silent (…). He speaks because the Jew remembers and, thus, refuses to remain silent. Despite himself” [Patterson, Sun Turned to Darkness, 17]; This echoes the protests of Daughter Zion in Lamentations (O’Connor, Lamentations & The Tears of the World).
21. Rambo, Spirit & Trauma.

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Bibliography

Caruth, Cathy “Introduction to Part II.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 151–157. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2016.

Felman, Shoshana. “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 13–60. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press , 1995.

Krystal, Henry. “Trauma and Aging: A Thirty-Year Follow Up.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 76–99. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Lanzmann, Claude. “The Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening with Claude Lanzmann.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 200–220. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Laub, Dori. “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 61–75. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Levine, Peter A. In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2010.

Newmark, Kevin. “Traumatic Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and the Shock of Laughter.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 236–255. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1995.

O’Connor, Kathleen. Lamentations & The Tears of the World. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002.

Patterson, David. Sun Turned to Darkness: Memory and Recovery in the Holocaust Memoir. Syracuse. NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998.

Rambo, Shelly. Resurrecting Wounds: Living in the Afterlife of Trauma. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2017.

Rambo, Shelly. Spirit & Trauma: A Theology of Remaining. Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, KY: 2010.

Scaer, Robert C. The Body Bears the Burden: Trauma, Dissociation, and Disease. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014.

van der Kolk, Bessel A. and Onno van der Hart. “The Intrusive Past: the Flexibility of memory and the engraving of trauma.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 158–182. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1995.