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The politics of
abuse: the traumatized child in Toni Morrison and Marguerite Duras.
by Laurie Vickroy
With the political liberation of various colonies in the 1950s there
also came the recognition of the need for a more profound investigation
of the dynamics of oppression and subjugation. In particular, cultural
theorists began to focus on the psychological effects of colonization
and the emotional strategies employed in response to such pressures.
Thus, Ashis Nandy drew attention to the way that the relationship
between the colonizer and the colonized was constructed as one of
"civilizing" parent/"primitive" child (34); Frantz Fanon demonstrated
the way that racist attitudes could be internalized and could transcend
any obvious issue of skin color (162); and Albert Memmi examined the
self-loathing emerging from conditions of oppression, i.e., "injustice,
insults, humiliation and insecurity" (16, 19-20). Similarly, literary
critics began to show how psychological theory can help to elucidate
not merely the artistic depiction of colonized subjects but also the
narrative techniques used in politically-conscious fiction. Patrick
Colm Hogan, for example, has used Lacan's notions of the socially
imposed ego to explore the relations between cultural domination and
madness in Bessie Head's A Question of Power, and Shoshana Felman and
Dori Laub have explored the way that traumatic responses are
significant factors in the recovery and narration of Holocaust
memories.
My purpose in the
following essay is to further this line of research by providing a more
detailed analysis of the relationship of trauma to social oppression
and by showing how this connection is dramatized in the critiques of
colonialism evident in Toni Morrison's and Marguerite Duras's fiction.
Although Morrison addresses white American racial dominance in the
1930s and Duras addresses British/French governmental dominance in East
Asia during these years, both writers are concerned with the relation
between social power and individual psychology and both try to give
voice to those who are traumatized by oppressive social and familial
forces. In particular I want to focus on Morrison's The Bluest Eye
(1970) and Duras's The Vice-Consul 1966), because both novels introduce
a new element into colonialist discourse: they feature as protagonists
young subaltern girls not previously represented in the Western
literary tradition. For both writers, traumatized children provide not
merely poignant metaphors but also concrete examples of the neglect,
exploitation, disempowerment and disavowal of certain communities and
even entire cultures (e.g., African American or Third World citizens).
In this way, these novels encourage us to see "colonialism" as an
on-going problem and in doing so they serve to challenge the
abstractness which frequently tends to characterize "postcolonial"
theorizing. I will demonstrate particularly how these writers challenge
the subordination of women and children by testifying to their
experience and by engaging their readers in that experience.
Trauma is an event in an individual's life which is "defined by its
intensity, by the subject's incapacity to respond adequately to it, and
by the upheaval and long-lasting effects that it brings about in the
psychical organization" (LaPlanche & Pontalis 465). Kai Erikson
emphasizes that trauma can result "from a constellation of life's
experiences as well as from a discrete event- from a prolonged exposure
to danger as well as from a sudden flash of terror, from a continuing
pattern of abuse as well as from a single assault, from a period of
attenuation and wearing away as well as from a moment of shock" (457).
Prolonged exposure to threats of violence and ongoing abuse are
particularly characteristic of oppressed groups and constitute a
pernicious form of trauma, because the constant stress and humiliation
are associated with being a person of low socioeconomic status (see
Brown 124-25).
In The Bluest Eye
several of Morrison's characters experience the gradual psychic erosion
of which Kai Erikson speaks (457), representing the weakening of whole
communities living under an oppressive white cultural dominance.
Whether the process of internalizing dominant values occurs
psychologically through reinforcement and punishment, or whether it is
a reflection of what Lacan saw as a universal process of inscription of
individual identity by the social order (Hogan 100), Morrison depicts
an imposing white culture whose values are enforced through a variety
of means (violent, economic, psychological, etc.). As she presents it,
what has been seen as individualized psychopathological symptoms must
be viewed differently when abuse is endured on a larger, systematic
level as in 1930s America. The Bluest Eye explores how the traumatic
experience of social powerlessness and devalued racial identity
prevents the African American community from joining together and
truthfully evaluating the similarity of their circumstances, much less
finding ways to oppose dominant forces.
The epitome of this devalued community, the Breedlove family suffers
from trauma caused by single, startling events, but also in the form of
daily, grinding oppression, whereby the parents pass their suffering on
to their children. The Breedlove's daughter, Pecola, is especially
sensitive to the fearful, repetitively ritualized violence that her
parents direct toward each other and their children. Her further
devaluation by the world, with little relief except from her playmates
and the whores who befriend her, includes constant ridicule from other
school children because of her dark skin, poverty and ugliness. The
black boys who torment her fail to recognize a fellow member of their
community. As Michael Awkward observes, their insults ironically
reflect "their ability to disregard their similarity to their victim;
the verse they compose to belittle her ('Black e
mo...Yadaddsleepsnekked') reflects their own skin color and, quite
possibly, familial situations" (191). White attitudes toward blacks are
exemplified in Pecola's encounter with the storeowner, Mr. Yacobowski:
"She looks up at him and sees the vacuum where curiosity ought to
lodge. And something more. The total absence of human recognition- the
glazed separateness" (42). In this context Pecola becomes especially
vulnerable to the sudden, violent traumas of being beaten and rejected
by her mother Pauline, and by the more horrific traumas of being raped
by her father Cholly and then losing the baby.
Pecola's parents, furthermore, are often powerless themselves, subject
to the whites who employ them, victims of their poverty and the culture
which invalidates them. In addition, they themselves have been
physically or emotionally abandoned by their families- Cholly was
rejected by both of his parents, Pauline was made an outsider because
of a limp. Traumatized children themselves, they continue the trauma by
denying their own weakness in their abuse of parental power, by
instilling their own fears of impotence, and by calling upon their
children to fulfill their own unmet needs.
Never valued as an individual when she was a child, Pauline continues
throughout her life to seek approval in others' eyes, particularly in
her position as a servant for whites. In the one place that she feels
powerful- the kitchen of the white family for whom she works- she
attacks her daughter (who has spilled a cobbler), and in turn denies
her own place in the world when she not only fails to acknowledge
Pecola but also comforts the white family's child. Pecola's desire for
blue eyes is in fact an inheritance from Pauline herself; based on
idealized white images- images of acceptance and beauty completely
disconnected from herself and her blackness- Pauline's desire is to
look like Jean Harlow. Pauline and Pecola, like the rest of the black
community, have internalized the pervasive standard of whiteness: in
the white dolls they buy their children, in the movies they watch and
emulate, and in their privileging of the light-skinned black child,
Maureen Peal, over the darker children. Donald Gibson points out that
even through narrative, in the use of the school primer as a
structuring device, Morrison has foregrounded the way that their lives
are "contained within the framework of the values of the dominant
culture and subjected to those values" (21). More subtly, she uses the
motif of trauma to suggest the overwhelming power that the larger white
culture wields in its slow, relentless obliteration of the value of
blackness, which forces them to affirm the dominant perspective because
cultivating awareness of their own collusion would bring incredible
pain, no readily available form of action, and increased hopelessness.
Cholly's traumatized past ultimately leads to consequences that are
even more devastating for his daughter. After being abandoned by his
parents, the most formatively brutalizing incident in Cholly's youth
was the interruption of his first sexual encounter by armed whites. The
experience of being forced by the white hunters to continue relations
with his partner constitutes a trauma not only in its humiliating
intensity, but also in the impossibility of his being able to react to
the situation. The displacement of his anger onto his fellow victim
Darlene, as Gibson notes (28), reveals the extent and depth of his
psychic wound: "Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward
the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him. They were big,
white, armed men. He was small, black, helpless" (119). Cholly, in
short, cannot assimilate the truth of his subjugation without being
annihilated by a sense of his own powerlessness.
When the environment sustains him, i.e., when his marriage and work are
stable, Cholly copes well, but when these sources of support and
stability are taken away his past returns to plague his present
actions. Psychological research indicates that stress causes "state
dependent returns to earlier behavior patterns" (Van der Kolk & Van
der Hart 444). A stressful situation will cause thoughts to travel
along the same pathways as those connected to a previous traumatic
event, and if immediate stimuli recall this event, the individual will
be transported back to that somatic (bodily) state and react
accordingly; responding as if faced with past threat, and losing "the
mental synthesis that constitutes reflective will and belief," the
individual will simply "transform into automatic wills and beliefs the
impulses which are momentarily the strongest" (445). Such is the
process which accounts in part for Cholly's rape of Pecola.
When Pecola makes a gesture which reminds him of the tender feelings he
once had for Pauline, Pecola's sadness and helplessness and his own
inability to make her happy provoke a repetition of the violent
impotence and the helpless fear that he and Darlene felt with the white
men. His angry response toward Darlene returns and becomes confounded
with feelings of love for Pauline and Pecola, and also with self
hatred, because Pecola is like Cholly once was, small and impotent. His
pessimistic attitudes toward life, himself and his capacity to love
return to this traumatic context, and he loses the ability to approach
life or his daughter positively. One way for him to rid himself of his
fears is to project them onto Pecola, and in part he tries to destroy
those fears by raping her.
This
type of projection as a manifestation of the trauma victim's
dissociation from the truth of his or her situation is not unique to
Cholly. The community in which the Breedlove family lives also projects
its own sense of devaluation onto the Breedloves, dismissing them for
being "low," ugly outsiders, when actually they are merely extreme
examples of the larger group's own abasement by white culture. An
important example of this projection may be seen in the way that
another member of their community, Geraldine, separates herself from
"trashy" blacks like Pecola, who she believes threaten her position vis
a vis whites.
She looked at
Pecola, Saw the dirty torn dress, the plaits sticking out on her head,
hair matted where the plaits had come undone, the muddy shoes with the
wad of gum peeping out from between the cheap soles....She had seen
this little girl all of her life....[children like Pecola] crowded into
pews at church, taking space from the nice, neat colored
children....Like flies they hovered; like flies they settled. And this
one had settled in her house. (75)
In her poverty and blackness, Pecola represents everything that
Geraldine is "fighting to suppress," and in telling Pecola to leave her
house she is "attempting to rid herself of her fears of her own
unworthiness, of her own shadow of blackness" (Awkward 194).
Geraldine's disregard of Pecola represents what Donald Gibson sees as
Morrison's acknowledgment of the black community's participation in its
own oppression (21). Geraldine and others fail to recognize that they
are outsiders in a white world. Not recognizing that they themselves
are what Morrison calls a "pariah community," they reject and revile
their own members, like the Breedloves, whereas they should examine the
condition of such despised members as "useful for the conscience of
that community," so that they can realistically evaluate their own
subjugation (Tate Interview 129).
Though not specifically addressing trauma, many critics of Morrison's
work, in particular Cynthia A. Davis, analyze how oppression is
represented in the form of "psychic violence," i.e., the
destructiveness of a white racist society which is not always
physically brutal, but destroys by engaging in "the systematic denial
of the reality of black lives" (323). Roberta Rubenstein also sees
Morrison's work as illustrating that the "constriction of the growth of
the self is implicitly linked to restrictive or oppressive cultural
circumstances" (126). Like Davis and Rubenstein, I believe that the
role of scapegoat which is assigned to the abused child Pecola in The
Bluest Eye reveals the connection between her devastated life and those
of the other individuals in her community. Not psychically able to
acknowledge their own lack of power, their seeming lack of sympathy
with Pecola is really a displacement "onto the Other all that is feared
in the self" (Davis 328). To avoid a sense of their own victimization,
the community projects its sense of inferiority onto Pecola, who "is
the epitome of the victim in a world that reduces persons to objects
and then makes them feel inferior as objects"; in order to escape from
a similar fate their response is to act within "the interlocking
hierarchies that allow most to feel superior to someone" (Davis 330).
The traumatic context of Duras's The Vice-Consul is Third World
destitution endured personally by one native character and observed by
European colonists living in India. The novel opens with a colonial
narrator and character imagining the thoughts and actions of a beggar
woman he has seen. He gives an extended account of the beggar, who as a
girl had become pregnant through her own ignorance and was subsequently
driven away from home by her mother. The narrative follows the beggar's
wandering on the roads from Cambodia to Calcutta, surviving despite the
experience of being outcast and pregnant and of giving birth to
numerous subsequent children whom she abandons out of madness and
destitution. Throughout the narrative she longs to be a child again,
imagining a return to her mother and clinging to all that she has left
of the safety of childhood and home, i.e., scraps of memories and a
word, the name of her town.
Interspersed with the beggar's story is that of a group of European
colonists who are appalled at the apparent breakdown of one of their
own- specifically the eponymous Vice-Consul, Jean-Marc de H., a
colonial official, who has shot at a group of East Indian lepers in the
Shalimar Gardens. This incident is not only harmful to his career but
disrupts the veneer of control that the colonials have amidst the
extreme poverty, disease and misery that lie just outside the walls of
their enclaves. The other male colonials, Peter Morgan, Charles
Rossett, Michael Richardson, and the French ambassador, Stretter, avoid
and abhor the Vice-Consul's instability and betrayal of their social
and psychological order. He gets marginal sympathy from the
ambassador's wife, Anne Marie Stretter, who, like Jean-Marc, is
affected deeply by the misery around her, but who also helps distract
and protect her many lovers in the colony from the realities of the
Third World: with her, they believe that "all the sorrows of the world
wash over them in waves" m(93). Although Jean-Marc and Anne Marie never
meet the beggar, both are textually linked to her in several ways: by
geographical proximity, in being abandoned by parents early in life,
and by their manifestations of madness and sorrow. The other men try to
keep Anne Marie away from Jean-Marc because his influence would bring
on despair and compromise her role as an emotional buffer for them. On
at least a subconscious level all these Europeans mirror in a milder
way the traumatic responses of the beggar in their denials of and
dissociations from reality.
Both
Morrison and Duras portray adults as preying on children and destroying
their innocence: Pecola is raped by her father, and the fate of Duras's
beggar began when she was a young Cambodian girl who became impregnated
by a neighbor. "I went into the forest with him," the girl says simply;
"I am too young to understand" (10). Like Pecola, the girl is still a
child, but menstruating, and so she is treated as an adult for adult
needs. When the Cambodian girl's mother rejects her for becoming
pregnant and forces her out into the world to beg because of her
"adult" behavior, she is refusing to see the girl as still a child and
is choosing on behalf of the survival of her younger children. The
mother's ruthless detachment from her daughter, like those in Pecola's
community, could also be a strategy of survival, an avoidance of the
pain of feeling that one is powerless to change one's situation because
this truth is too overwhelming. Although the mother inflicts a
traumatizing emotional and physical isolation upon her daughter, the
text leaves open the possibility that though the mother's anger, like
Cholly's toward Pecola, is directed at the daughter, it may stem from
the impossibility of any other kind of action, given her own destitute
situation and belief in sexual taboos.
The child victims created by Morrison and Duras are the embodiment of
traumatic knowledge that, once understood and articulated, would reveal
fearful truths about the other characters' lives. This knowledge,
denied by victims and observers alike, sets individuals apart from one
another, and underlies separations by skin color, cultural affiliation,
class, etc., that help to maintain hierarchies of power. The
"communities" depicted in The Bluest Eye and in The Vice-Consul all
lack an ability to recognize themselves and their own experience in the
outcasts they shun. They illustrate what Judith Herman so aptly
describes as the communal expedience of forgetting such truths:
"Repression, dissociation and denial are phenomena of social as well as
individual consciousness" (9).
Neither her family nor community can offer Pecola support- the latter
are embarrassed or revolted by her incestuous pregnancy and madness.
They blame the "dog" Cholly, but cannot offer her comfort because her
situation is an extreme of their own unacknowledged powerlessness. The
narrator Claudia admits: "All of us felt so wholesome after we cleaned
ourselves on her....Even her waking dreams we used- to silence our own
nightmares....We honed our egos on her....and yawned in the fantasy of
our strength" (159). It is this lack of understanding and response that
Morrison attacks, the toleration of isolated suffering, which in fact
not only reflects but also perpetuates collective suffering. For all
the Breedloves, trauma stems from their devastated, love-deprived
lives, from a barren cultural landscape, a "soil [which] is bad for
certain flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it
will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we
acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong of
course..." (160). According to Claudia, in 1930s America the oppressed
and traumatized cannot help one another because the only power they
have available to them is that of feeling superior to the weakest. This
is especially evident in the treatment of children. Alice Miller
stresses that the kind of contempt and violence shown to children is
really the weapon of the weak to mask their own feelings of
helplessness and loneliness (67-69). Morrison's work often recognizes
the mistreatment of children (e.g., Sula and Beloved) and, though
attributing it to adults who have also been brutalized, she
nevertheless does not condone their abuse of power.
The madness brought on by the victimization of the two child
protagonists frightens others. The people of her town avoid Pecola and
exacerbate her separateness by removing her from school because of her
uncanny, staring eyes. The beggar in Duras's novel similarly terrifies
other characters, such as the British colonist Charles Rossett. When
she approaches him covered with mud, her "unwavering smile is
terrifying" (163) as she bites the head off a live fish in his
presence. Unable to endure the reality of her madness and her filth, he
runs toward the safety of the fence which encloses his hotel, and which
separates the whites from the people of color, the rich from the poor,
the colonists from the colonized. Rossett is afraid of the beggar
because he cannot tolerate that which he cannot act upon, that which
would make him despair, i.e., madness, hopelessness, poverty, the
forces of nature, all of which the beggar represents. He and the other
colonists do not want to acknowledge that they might also be vulnerable
to these forces. Hence, the beggar- but also the Vice-Consul, one of
the few colonials who can empathize and give up the illusion of
emotional control- become the objects of others' fear or scorn in order
that these others can avoid their own role in the oppression and
destitution they witness. In The Bluest Eye, avoidance of these
individuals enables those in the larger group to mask their fears and
their collusion in systems that degraded themselves; in The
Vice-Consul, the colonizers mask their fear, their privileged status,
and their weakness in the face of abjection through denial and
avoidance.
In their discussion of
trauma, Van der Kolk and Van der Hart explain that "a feeling of
helplessness, of physical or emotional paralysis, is fundamental to
making an experience traumatic: the person was in a position of being
unable to take any action that could affect the outcome of events," and
because appropriate categorization of experience was impaired,
traumatic experience cannot be integrated into memory as with normal
events (446). A failure to make sense of these past experiences results
in fixed ideas which create repetitive and impotent activities around
attempted recreations of the event, and leads to dissociation, where
the individual becomes "emotionally constricted and cannot experience a
full range of affects." At its worst, personality development is
arrested and "cannot expand any more by the addition or assimilation of
new elements" (432). In a traumatic experience the past remains
unresolved and lingering, because it is not processed in the way that
normal information is: either cognitively or emotionally. Non-traumatic
memories lose their force, for when new ideas and information become
stored, they "are constantly combined with old knowledge to form
flexible mental schemas," and once an event is within a larger scheme,
the remembrance of it changes and the event cannot be accessed as an
individual element anymore. In contrast, traumatic memories are those
which are frozen in time, not subject to a previous contextualization
or to subsequent experience, and are therefore reexperienced without
change (441-42). The reality of the traumatic event "continues to elude
the subject who lives in its grip and unwittingly undergoes its
ceaseless repetitions and reenactments" (Felman & Laub 69).
Moreover, Van der Kolk and Ducey affirm that "a sudden and passively
endured trauma is relived repeatedly, until a person learns to remember
simultaneously the affect and cognition associated with the trauma
through access to language" (271).
In a traumatic context repetition can be an attempt to attack one's own
fears, as in Cholly's rape of Pecola, but it can also be a sign of
being caught in stasis, of not being able to move on and resolve the
initial trauma. Pecola's compulsion to repeat begins after her rape. In
her conversations with her imaginary friend, her obsessive but
ineffectual questioning of herself and what happened with her father-
"He just tried, see? He didn't do anything. You hear me?" (154)-
exhibits some of the repetition and dissociation common in the victims
of such experience, and this coupled with her mother's denial- "She
didn't even believe me when I told her" (155)- cuts Pecola off from any
reconcilable knowledge of what she endured. Pecola takes her other
"voice" (a split-off part of herself) to task for continuing to
question her about what happened with Cholly, expressing a desperate
need to be believed, to understand, and yet to forget and deny as well.
Her response is very similar to that of many trauma victims, who, as
Robert Jay Lifton has observed, feel compelled both to confront and to
avoid traumatic experience (162-63).
Pecola's desire for blue eyes becomes obsessive after her rape, and her
conviction that she has been given them by Soaphead Church (the man who
promises her a miracle) indicates a complete psychic disintegration.
Her own negative reflection in others' eyes has been the continual
source of her pain, and her main wish is that her reflection be
desirable. The extent of Pecola's obsession and pathology at this stage
is presented through hallucinations, through her resistance to
blinking, and her delusional view that others envy her gift. "Look. I
can look right at the sun..." she says, "I don't even have to
blink...He really did a good job. Everybody's jealous. Every time I
look at somebody, they look off" (151). Her obsessive return to the
mirror for reassurance that her "blue eyes" are the bluest and the
nicest- "How many times a minute are you going to look?" her "friend"
asks (150)- also represents a textual repetition of the destructive
power of judgment based solely on appearance and prejudice.
With this repeated theme and imagery Morrison underscores her critique
of the way that an individual's entire being is reduced to and
determined in a glance, just as she is deeply critical of insubstantial
and superficial images that lead to the creation of false selves and
which assign such power to the gazer. Pecola's belief that she has blue
eyes represents her pitiable attempt to take power, for she is now the
one who looks, but they more importantly symbolize the trauma of not
being loved. She defends against her pain by reexperiencing others'
gazes with what she believes is an acceptable, if not loveable,
appearance. Ironically, this delusion makes her more of an outcast
because her madness spooks everyone, including her mother. In our last
glimpse of Pecola, her wandering in a regressive animal-like state is
punctuated by useless, repetitive movements:
The damage done was total. She spent her days, her tendril, sap-green
days, walking up and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of
a drummer so distant only she could hear. Elbows bent, hands on
shoulders, she flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely
futile effort to fly. Beating the air, a winged but grounded bird,
intent on the blue void it could not reach- could not even see- but
which filled the valleys of the mind. (158)
Duras's beggar acts in an even more repetitive fashion, particularly
after the loss of her first child. The successive abandonment of her
children is but one scenario connected with her own abandonment. In
order to survive and obtain food she must prostitute herself to other
fishermen, forcing her to reenact the original loveless sexual
encounter which led to her pregnancy and rejection. Her somnambulistic,
interminable walking also exhibits reenactive and dissociative
responses to trauma. In wandering, she is obeying her mother's early
commands to leave. As she is about to leave the first child behind, she
feels that the word for her home village, "Battambang," will protect
her- a word she will repeat, the only word remaining to her, signifying
a desire to return home to her mother and to the past (46, 48-49).
This unproductive traumatic activity is also subtly linked by both
Morrison and Duras to metaphors of nature or fecundity gone awry.
Pecola, just become a biological woman at age eleven, cannot sustain
her father's unwanted seed. In The Vice-Consul, like the cloyingly
sweet custard apples, children are obscenely abundant beyond what can
be sustained and are consequently wasted (just as in another of Duras's
novels set in Indochina, The Sea Wall, the dead bodies of children are
said to make the land fertile). Each girl (Pecola and the beggar)
carries a child (or children in the beggar's case) that is lost or left
behind, and these losses create dissociation and deterioration from
which they never recover. In the beggar girl's rejection of her first,
and subsequent infants, Duras represents in "the abandonment of a child
the scandalous limit of dispossession: the limit of misery, of
un-awareness, of madness" (Borgomano 489). When babies do not survive,
the future is cut off; so the loss of these children is a powerful
symbol of an ultimate loss of the future. As the narrator of The Bluest
Eye says, "I felt a need for someone to want the black baby [Pecola's]
to live- just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls..."
(148).
The most severe traumatic
loss of the beggar girl's life was having to give up her first child, a
girl. Although she knew that she would never be able to find work with
a child in tow, she had heard that whites will sometimes take in
children (38). Accordingly, she pursued a French woman and begged her
to take her ill, starving child, which the mother did (40-43)- as
Duras's own mother once did (Vircondelet 37; Borgomano 491). While the
French foster-mother consults with a doctor and cries over the
obviously doomed infant, the baby's girl-mother observes: "It no longer
concerns me. It is the business of other women now. You [the baby] in
addition to myself, an impossible association, yet how hard it was to
separate us" (49). And then to dramatize this dissociation, the
narrative shifts to the third person:
The doctor approaches the newly-washed infant, and gives it an
injection. The child gives a feeble cry....Unconsciously, she mimics
the grimace on the child's crumpled face. For the rest of her life she
will feel, between her shoulders, the pressure of the child's weight,
her exact weight now. Alive or dead, for her the child will never
exceed that weight. The girl leaves the spot from which she has been
watching. She turns her back, now bare of its burden, on the window.
She leaves. (49-50)
Speaking for
and about her, Duras's narrator predicts that the girl will in turn
abandon all her other children after this one, that she will put them
aside, miss them briefly and forget them. This detachment from them can
be explained as a way of coping with the loss of the first child; in
order to keep that original pain at bay, she shuts down affectively and
separates herself from them both physically and emotionally. In doing
so she also repeats her own traumatic separation from her mother.
When individuals are exposed to trauma, i.e., a frightening event
outside of ordinary human experience, they experience "speechless
terror" (Van der Kolk & Van der Hart 442). Traumatic memory,
psychoanalyst Judith Herman explains, is "wordless and static" and
initially iconic or visual (175, 177); it also manifests itself in
"behavioral reenactments, nightmares [or] flashbacks" because traumatic
experience "cannot be easily translated into the symbolic language
necessary for linguistic retrieval" (Van der Kolk & Van der Hart
442-43). Traumatic experience creates a "loss of voice...of knowledge,
of awareness, of truth, of the capacity to feel...and to speak" (Felman
& Laub 231-32). In order to help the individual to reexperience the
past fully and affectively, it is therefore necessary for the therapist
to encourage the victim to construct a completed narrative of the
event, including "a full and vivid description of the traumatic
imagery" (Herman 177). Duras and Morrison are "textual" therapists who
attempt to recover traumatic experience from the silence and repression
that attends it.
In both novels
there is an attempt to speak for victims virtually silenced by the
process of trauma. First, this takes the form of trying to articulate
the victims' own words, suggesting their traumatized condition through
the narratively dissociative yet emotionally overdetermined quality of
these words. For example, the only word left to the beggar, the name of
her hometown, "Battambang," is repeatedly invoked to emphasize her
desire to return home (though there is some indication that she would
no longer recognize it), and to symbolize the safe place of childhood.
Even though this is the place of her mother's rejection of her, she
longs to speak in her own language (she has strayed, symbolically, out
of her own country). The narrator informs us that she speaks to her
absent mother now that she no longer has the child to hear her, but she
remains silenced in effect because her word(s) remain incomprehensible
to others.
Julia Kristeva asserts
that in Duras's texts the sense of loss or void is presented as "unused
affects and in a discourse emptied of meaning," but that her texts also
speak a "discourse of blunted pain," which represents "the trace of an
absence" (140, 146). That is, all that is left for these dispossessed
individuals is a profound sense of absence of self or of significant
others. Kristeva does not directly link Duras's characterization and
discourse to traumatic reactions, but I would argue that these "traces"
also correspond to the left-over emotions and the inarticulateness
common to victims of trauma, and that if such emptiness is in keeping
with Duras's general philosophy, it is also important to acknowledge
that this philosophical conception is born in a context of trauma and
takes the form of a psychological critique of oppression.
Pecola similarly seeks comfort in words. In part she seeks
understanding of what her father has done to her, but her conflicted
dialogue with a split-off persona of herself also illustrates how much
she has been isolated and how her pain and need to speak are ignored by
her community and even her family. To characterize this self-splitting,
Morrison utilizes an interchange of roman type and italics: "How come
you don't talk to anybody? I talk to you....I just wondered. You don't
talk to anybody. You don't go to school. And nobody talks to you. How
do you know nobody talks to me? They don't. When you're in the house
with me, even Mrs. Breedlove doesn't say anything to you. Ever.
Sometimes I wonder if she even sees you" (153). Hence, both writers are
faced with two important issues when speaking for these protagonists:
first, there is the necessity of communicating their experience so that
it will be known; second, there is the question of how this can be done
when the characters are cut off from linguistic connections or from
dialogue with others. They address this dilemma by creating other
voices to compensate for the gaps.
Outsider narrators are employed by both writers to supplement the
victims' voices and to construct the "completed narration" that is
essential for their stories to be fully told and for the therapeutic
function of such telling to occur. By demonstrating the limitations of
their narrators, however, both writers also acknowledge the problem of
the further oppression that might result from the attempt to give
voices to oppressed victims. Morrison tells Pecola's story in part
through an omniscient narrator and primarily through the sympathetic
eyes of Claudia, who has been Pecola's friend and who realizes the harm
done to Pecola by the community, including herself in that complicity:
"She seemed to fold into herself, like a pleated wing. Her pain
antagonized me" (61); "We tried to see her without looking at
her...because we had failed her" (158). Not only is Claudia sympathetic
toward Pecola, but she is also self-conscious and self-critical about
her own complicity. In this way, through her narrative we are doubly
exposed to the dynamics and effects of racism. Similarly, if Claudia is
an insider in the way she experiences some of the same pain as Pecola,
she is also an outsider and privileged in the sense that having been
loved, she possesses the strength to have her own desires. Outsider and
insider at the same time, she is sympathetically aware of the need to
recognize her community's role and their own defeat in Pecola's
disintegration.
Duras's use of a
male narrator to tell the story of an abused girl is equally effective
in drawing attention to the suspect position of speaking for (i.e.,
defining) an other. Peter Morgan tries to understand the tragedy of
Calcutta through the narration of the beggar's story, and his hope is
that "wisdom may start to grow out of bitter experience" (18). In his
narrative appropriation of others' suffering, however, Morgan indulges
in what Eric Santner would call "narrative fetishism," i.e., "the
construction and deployment of a narrative consciously or unconsciously
designed to expunge the traces of the trauma or loss that called that
narrative into being in the first place" (144). As Duras portrays him,
Morgan, like most of the other colonists, keeps himself remote from the
horrors of deprivation surrounding him by creating a narrative about a
dispossessed beggar woman whom he sees in Calcutta. Only by focusing in
on one case of destitution in a fictional form can he approach the
woman's condition from a safe distance: "I am drunk with the sufferings
of India. Aren't we all, more or less? It's impossible to talk about
such suffering unless one has made it as much a part of oneself as
breathing. That woman stirs my imagination. I note down my thoughts
about her" (124). The identification with suffering that Morgan claims
for himself is actually more true of the Vice-Consul (whom Morgan
studiously avoids) and Anne Marie Stretter, who are both immediately
and emotionally affected by India, and almost driven mad by it. Thus
Morgan's approach reveals the fear, denial and repression
characteristic of the colonists' position, and though he uses his own
memory and others' accounts to "explain the madness of the beggar woman
of Calcutta" (54), he remains out of touch with the sources and
contexts of her madness.
Morgan's
attempt to identify with this woman and with India through language is
also problematic because she has no available language with which to
express herself and her sufferings. Up to a point Morgan is aware of
this problem: "How to put into words the things she never said?...How
to describe the things that she does not know she has seen, the
experiences that she does not know she has had? How to reconstruct the
forgotten years?" (55). Duras displays here an awareness of possible
appropriation and the simultaneous need to understand that occasions
any narrative. We should also notice the way that Duras ultimately
removes the beggar from the control of the colonial viewer of her
story. That is, though Morgan's narrative serves to establish the
story's context and the voices of the colonists, Duras follows the
beggar further than he does and allows her to surpass the definition
and containment of Morgan's narrative when she is described toward the
end of the novel by an unidentified neutral narrator. The beggar here
emerges in an almost triumphant madness, as if in panoply; she ceases
here to be the one who helps another (Morgan) to understand himself and
becomes someone whose presence demands recognition in and of itself. By
bringing her into contact with the obsessively rational Englishman
Rossett, Duras forces a colonist to confront directly the awful reality
of the beggar- i.e., one of their colonized subjects- and he is
horrified by the encounter (163-64).
In The Vice-Consul the beggar becomes an externalized symbol of
oppression and of the sufferings Duras witnessed during her childhood
in Indochina; she becomes what Madeleine Borgomano has called the
"generating cell" of Duras's work. In her more autobiographical novels
(The Sea Wall, The Lover, and The North China Lover) the beggar is
deeply mourned and internalized into the workings of the narrator's
identity and Duras's relation to her family. According to Maria
DeBattista, she "comes to symbolize for Duras the negative
interpenetration of figure and world, indeed represents...the
possibility of representing the sufferings of the world, the
brutalities of colonialism...and it is here, and here only, that
literature stops and writing becomes sacred- here where it rejoins the
world as a transgressive text insistent on its sins but penitent for
its self-absorption" (295). In many of Duras's texts the characters are
caught in madness and pain without social context and these works would
seem to reinforce Kristeva's argument that in Duras's work political
life becomes unreal, that "madness represents a space of antisocial,
apolitical, and paradoxically, free individuation" (143). Certainly, in
many of her texts traumatic events are measured in the context of
individualized human pain; to focus on the victims' pain, however, does
not remove the influence of the world, but rather emphasizes the human
consequences of its machinations. In The Vice-Consul, and later works
such as The Lover and The North China Lover, the contexts of colonized
India and Indochina are specified, and it is precisely through Duras's
rendering of the effects on individuals of such contexts that we can
measure the traumatic impact of world events and practices. The
"generating cell" that fuels her need to write is part of a real
childhood memory- of her mother buying a dying infant from a beggar
woman: "The act has remained with me in an opaqueness from which I will
never emerge...the event recurs to me as a problem to resolve with the
only means that I have, that is, writing...I have tried to put it in
literature...and I have not succeeded" (cited in Borgomano 491, trans.
mine). Much of Duras's writing has been an attempt to understand this
woman's act, an event which has continued to haunt her, and which
cannot be separated in her mind from the larger context of destitution
and colonialism in the Third World.
Morrison's work also shows a strong awareness that victims of trauma
are mentally imprisoned and isolated by their traumatic experience, and
she makes it very clear that disturbed relationships reflect and
interconnect with a broader social context. Focusing on traumatized
characters who return to unresolved memories, she suggests that our
ability to change the nature of our attachments to others depends on
whether we evaluate the past and examine our behaviors and relations in
it. What is especially needed from all black writers, she says, is "the
clear identification of what the enemy forces are, not this person or
that person and so on, but the acknowledgment of a way of life dreamed
up for us by some other people who are at the moment in power, and
knowing the ways in which it can be subverted" ("Memory" 146). Thus the
message that underlies her focus on traumatized victims is not merely
that they are oppressed, but that correcting the situation cannot be
done by solitary individuals who are psychologically and even
physically immobilized. This is why Morrison emphasizes communal or
collective knowledge, solidarity, refusal and resistance: "If my work
is to be functional to the group then it must bear witness and identify
that which is useful from the past...it must make it possible to
prepare for the present and live it out, and it must do that not by
avoiding problems and contradictions but by examining them" ("Memory"
389). In a world where the social, racial and political exercise of
power creates destruction of the human psyche so that it cannot oppose
domination, Morrison's emphatic message is that the traumatized
responses of individuals must not be relegated to the domestic sphere
but should instead be seen as a clear signal that destructive forces
are at work. For Morrison, the act of narration can be one means in the
process of collecting and sharing knowledge heretofore held by
"discredited people," a means of resisting the urge to see collective
victimization only as individualized ("Memory" 388; Davis Interview
146).
There is a tendency for both
those involved and the outsiders to want to forget or cover up real
traumas. As Judith Herman explains, to become aware of extreme abuses
leads us "into realms of the unthinkable and...forces us to face human
vulnerability and our capacity for evil, forces us to bear witness to
horrible events"; to become aware also sometimes requires that one take
sides between victims and perpetrators, especially where the
perpetrators promote forgetting and defend themselves through secrecy,
silence, denial and undermining of victims' accusations (7-8). Duras
and Morrison want their readers to confront the unthinkable, to be able
to demystify what is denied or rationalized, to help readers unfold
those "unspeakable things unspoken" that Morrison refers to in
discussing the exclusion of African Americans from American literary
and cultural history ("Unspeakable" 1). Morrison has said: "My writing
expects, demands participatory reading...it's about involving the
reader. The reader supplies the emotions" (Tate Interview 125). Duras
similarly will not let go of the injustices she witnessed in her youth
in Indochina, incorporating them in her writing as much as possible,
and she goes even further than Morrison in describing her engaged
readers' connection to her texts as "a private relationship between the
book and the reader. They weep and grieve together" (Practicalities
107).
What can be the writer's
rights and goals in describing such misery? Can such abjection be
understood? Morrison and Duras are very sensitive to how the social
construction of individuals and the internalization of inferior status
can be formidable and brutal. They suggest that oppression and
resulting psychic vulnerability will be perpetuated unless memories are
collectively articulated and shared, and this I posit is where the
greatest value of their work lies: in helping readers to empathize with
and share the victim's experience from the victim's point of view, and
in insisting through their portrayal of narrators that we all must
explore our own role in this victimization, whether our guilt take the
form of direct responsibility or complicity. Through their depiction of
the larger social contexts of trauma, Morrison and Duras urge their
readers to remember and evaluate the wrongs of the past. They recognize
what Shoshana Felman calls the importance of testifying about what has
been forgotten or repressed: "To testify is thus not merely to narrate
but to commit oneself, and to commit the narrative, to others: to take
responsibility- in speech- for history or for the truth of an
occurrence, for something which, by definition, goes beyond the
personal, in having general (nonpersonal) validity and consequences"
(204). Both writers acknowledge that the inarticulate victims of abuse
can be spoken for only inadequately, can be understood only partially,
and yet that they need such interpretation from outside because they
cannot do it alone. In giving each of their characters the opportunity
to speak or to act in his or her own right, however briefly, Duras and
Morrison give us a sense of the victim's limited ability to communicate
and act, and his or her need to find empathetic ears.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LAURIE VICKROY is Assistant Professor of English at Bradley University.
Her essays have appeared in Modern Language Studies, Obsidian and The
Journal of Durassian Studies. She is currently writing a book-length
study of Marguerite Duras and Toni Morrison which examines their
writing in the contexts of mothering, trauma and narrative.
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