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MIXING MEMORY WITH TRAUMA IN THE WORKS OF
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AND. MALCOLM LOWRY

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MIXING MEMORY WITH TRAUMA IN THE WORKS OF SIGMUND FREUD. D. H.
LAWRENCE, VIRGINIA WOOLF, AND MALCOLM LOWRY

By

Mei-Yu Tsai

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

2005

ABSTRACT

MIXING MEMORY WITH TRAUMA IN THE WORKS OF SIGMUND F REUD, D. H.
LAWRENCE, VIRGINIA WOOLF, AND MALCOLM LOWRY

By

Mei-Yu Tsai

Drawing on Freud’s writing on trauma and recent trauma studies, this dissertation
addresses the idea of modernist literature as a literature of trauma. I argue that both
Freud and modernist writers, in their encounter with the overwhelming historical traumas
of the twentieth century, register an intense awareness of the catastrophic effects of
historical trauma on the individual psyche. Reading modernist texts along with Freud’s
writing on trauma, this dissertation does not investigate how their writing is a traumatic
symptom of the war. First, this dissertation investigates what it means for modernist
writers to conceptualize history as the history of trauma. Second, it investigates how
their writing has internalized the shocking and unresolved nature of traumatic history in
formal devices such as modernist narrative. I argue that modernist narrative employs a
peculiar form of non-linearity, blurring all distinctions between past, present, and future,
and constant circling around loss to inhabit history through the symptomology of trauma.
These essentially formal devices manifest not just as aesthetic representations, but also as

unmediated repetitions of a trauma that has yet to be worked through.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It has been such a treat to write under the guidance of Professor Eyal Amiran that
I envy myself. His intellectual inﬂuence stimulated the ﬁrst ideas of this project, and
his cool insight of knowing when to give advice and when to let me ﬁgure out the
complex issues has helped me through this satisfying but necessarily difficult journey in
conceiving, researching, and writing a dissertation. Without his suggestions and subtle
demands, I don’t think I would have managed to complete this project in anything like its
present state. He has a special claim to my lasting appreciation. I have also been
blessed by a wonderful guidance committee. Professor William Johnson demonstrates
that an intellectually successful scholar needs not to comprise on humane warmth. His
caring support of this project and conﬁdence in me have gone beyond the call of
professional duty. My warm thanks goes to him. Professor Sheila Teahan is equally
eloquent in giving support and encouragement for which I am grateful. I also want to
express my gratitude to Professor Patrick O’Donnell’s suggestions on this project; his
approval of it adds a special dimension to my Ph.D. career. A Dissertation Completion
Fellowship from the English Department has contributed to the completion of this
dissertation.

The amazing presence of my friends during this lonely and long progress of
writing a dissertation has made my life so much easier and more pleasurable. This
project would have never come into being without their support and loving-kindness. I
would like to dedicate this dissertation to a wonderful couple—Lina Wu and Chung-Wen
Chen. Lina has been incredible in insisting that a dissertation should be inspiring. On a

journey to New York in 2002, I had a debate with her about the meaning of writing an

inspiring dissertation, and that debate changed the entire course of my writing project. I
am so grateful that she won the debate. Her husband Chung-Wen has been a constant
and graceful supplier of technological support that I have never experienced a moment of
panic even when my computer broke down. They have shown me what it means to have
a big heart and to be larger than life. Li Hsieh has been an invaluable friend that every
dissertation writer would desire to have. I can never thank her enough for her support,
ﬁnancially and spiritually. The following supporting group have been generous in
providing joy, ﬁ’iendship, and care——Manashi Ray, Aloka and Ralph Pyre, Anna Fisher,
Eric Ederer, Peter and Lisa Kong, Nancy and Jim Jean, Yingying Wong, Wei Chang,
Shu-J en Hsieh, and Chueh-An. My gratitude to them has gone beyond what I can
acknowledge here. And now it is with deep appreciation that I thank my family for their
understanding and support during this unpredictably often trying years of PhD. journey.
My mom dreamt of me passing the dissertation defense days before the actual defense.

She was so happy that she smiled in her dreams. And so did 1.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter I

Introduction: Trauma and Repetition in Modernist Literature ............................ 1
Chapter II

Limping to History: Trauma and Its Vicissitudes .......................................... 21
Chapter III

The Dynamic Principle of the Oxymoron in Women in Love ............................ 49
Chapter IV

“Remember My Party” through Trauma: the War and the Politics

Memory in Mrs. Dalloway ..................................................................... 83
Chapter V

The Psyche that Writes a Suicidal Discourse: Narcissism and

Trauma in Under the Volcano ................................................................. 117
Chapter VI

Conclusion: “A Darkness that Murmured” .................................................. 138
Works Cited ..................................................................................... 142

Chapter I: Introduction: Trauma and Repetition in Modernist Literature

This dissertation reads modernist texts along with Freud’s writing on trauma.
Reading them together, this dissertation does not simply attempt to apply a
psychological theory to modernist literature. More profoundly, I seek to remark
on a modernist vision of history as trauma shared by both Freud and modernist
writers who wrote in the wake of the two world wars and their various aftermaths.
I argue that both modernism and Freud’s writing on trauma after 1914 begin to
register an intense awareness of the catastrophic effects of historical trauma on the
individual psyche. In their encounter with traumatic events marked with
psychological injuries, modernist writing has internalized the shocking and
unresolved nature of traumatic history in formal terms. In this respect, Karen
DeMeester has argued that modernist literature is a literature of trauma in that
“their forms often replicate the damaged psyche of a trauma survivor and their
contents often portray his characteristic disorientation and despair” (650).1
Following DeMeester, I aim to consider modernist literature as a literature of
trauma by addressing the impact of historical trauma on the ways in which trauma
is conceptualized and understood, and how this has in turn been reﬂected in
modernist literature. I shall argue that all the texts examined in this
dissertation—Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Moses and Monotheism, Women in
Love, Mrs. DaIloway, and Under the Volcano—incorporate the psychological
chaos and fragmentation of conscious caused by trauma into their writing.

Bringing a historical vision to modernism and reading modernist literature as a

 

lKaren DeMeester, “Trauma and Recovery in Virginia Woolt‘s Mrs. Dal/away,” Modern Fiction
Studies 44.3 (1998): 649-673.

literature of trauma, I hope to show that the mad and schizophrenic nature of
modernist narrative has both aesthetic and historical justiﬁcation.

Although this dissertation will draw on trauma theory that ﬂourished
particularly in the 19803 and 19905 to support my argument that modernist
narratives mirror the traumatized mind, it is important to point out that long
before trauma was given ofﬁcial recognition by the American Psychiatric
Association in 1980 in the form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)2,
modernist narratives have struggled to give meaning to a psychological
condition—the haunting effect of trauma—that will trouble psychiatrists for
another ﬁfty years. It is also worthwhile to mark that recent trauma theory by
literary critics builds upon Freud’s observation on the traumatic experience of

shell-shocked soldiers.3 In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud uses the term to

 

2 The American Psychiatric Association deﬁnes PTSD as: “The essential feature of this disorder is
the development of characteristic symptoms following a psychologically distressing event that is
outside the range of usual human experience. . . . The stressor producing this syndrome would be
markedly distressing to almost anyone, and is usually experienced with intense fear, terror, and
helplessness. The characteristic symptoms involve reexperiencing the traumatic event, avoidance
of stimuli associated with the event or numbing of general responsiveness, and increased arousal”
(247). See American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders, 3"ll ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1980).

3 Although trauma theory emerged in the United States in the early 19903 as a response to the
collective traumatic legacies of the Vietnam War and Holocaust, the study of trauma as a new
phenomenon that best marks twentieth-century as a ceaselessly and chaotic society can be traced
back to the 1910s’ fascination with the epidemic appearance of shell shock. For the background
of historical trauma studies, see Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner, eds, Ti'aumatic Pasts: History,
Psychiatry, and Emma in the Modern Age, 1870-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001).
Contemporary trauma studies have arisen to elaborate on the cultural and ethical implications of
trauma. In order to understand the phenomenon of trauma, recent critical interest in trauma
studies has involved intersections of various disciplines-psychoanalysis, history, sociology, and
literary criticism. Trauma studies explore the issue of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and
how trauma gets represented. Although there is a signiﬁcant number of works addressing the
ﬁgure and effects of trauma, there is no single methodology dealing with these issues. Roughly
speaking, the ﬁeld of trauma studies can be divided into two groups. The ﬁrst group is composed
of applied scientists, psychiatrists, and social workers who are more concerned with the treatment
of trauma, of working through the traumatic stress/symptoms. Critics who are concerned with the
representation and narration of trauma form a second group. Critical work on trauma done by
Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, and Bessel van der Kolk largely informs the interest
of this group.

describe a painful event not inﬂicted to the body but to the mind. Freud’s
conceptualization of trauma speaks to an event which breaks through the
protecting shield and overwhelms existing defenses in a form that the physical
breaking of defenses becomes thus a psychic one. Once the protective shield is
breached, traumatic victims both inside and outside analysis seem caught in a
compulsive repetition of self-destructive behavior which makes them seem fated
for a negative destiny. In trauma, therefore, victims engage a perpetual struggle to
escape the original traumatic event while binding to that event in an endless
repetition of undoing, of acting out the symptoms of trauma, at the same time
denying that trauma. The history of traumatized individual peculiarly manifests
the uncanny effect of “death instinct.” Trauma deﬁes not only meaning but also
any form of subjectivization: it is as though it cuts through, interrupts, and brings
to a halt psychic life and impedes its subsequent development. At issue, however,
is not so much the discontinuity as the intolerable, unacceptable continuity of the
experience. I shall argue that trauma both as a clinical syndrome and a trope to
account for a world that seems threateningly out of control provides a psychical
response to the impact of catastrophic historical events. As an interpretation of
the past, trauma is a special form of memory, a memory that tells a story of
psychic wounds that deﬁes representation. By virtue of this structure of
repetition, trauma poses a challenge to historical knowledge, since it is always the
symptomology of trauma that one confronts and never the event itself. Although
traumatic memory may not bring comprehensive knowledge, it does allow, as

Cathy Caruth suggests, “history to arise where immediate understanding may not”

(11; italics in original).4 In this dissertation, I ask, speciﬁcally, how modernist
ﬁction addresses events that are not “fully” conscious, that is, not fully
experienced or assimilated, as is the case with so-called traumatic events. What
does writing become if we recognize that we have not fully understood events, or
that our knowledge of them is not exhaustive? These are all the questions that
concern the knowledge of trauma. Take the character of Septimus Smith in Mrs.
Dalloway for example. Returning home from the war with a shattered self,
Septimus reﬂects on the meaning of his survival:

It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking at England from the

train window, as they left Newhaven; it might be possible that the

world itself is without meaning. (133;emphasis added)
Such a reﬂection on a world as potentially meaningless excruciatingly illustrates
how a wound in the psyche long after the event still has power to hurt and disrupt,
threatening the total annihilation of the personal spirit. With a wounded psyche,
Septimus experiences internal forces that tear apart and fragment the self as if one
part of his self was mysteriously lurking in the mind, with a separate vitality of its
own. His story is wedded to the issue of survival, of continuing beyond “death”
after a life threatening situation. Having descended into the depths of war horror
and a form of death and returned to the world of the living, Septimus ﬁnds the
best way to go on living is to return like a ghost, hovering between life and death.
Like a ghost, the original occurrence cannot be remembered but nevertheless

leaves its trace on the life of the victim, and, in the case of Septimus, he haunts

 

4 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1996).

the text of Mrs. Dalloway as much as he is haunted by his psychic wounds. A
ghost symbolizes the paradox of life/death, of absence/presence. Its presence is a
sign of some past wounds, some crime that has not been witnessed, and is
therefore a sign also that the present still suffers from that psychic disorder. The
story of Septimus, therefore, testiﬁes to an impossibility to remember and at the
same time to a compulsion to repeat (re-live), an incomprehensible persistence of
belated and fragmentary after-affects. Just because the experience has not been
given meaning, he is continually haunted by it in dreams, ﬂashbacks, and
hallucinations.

Septimus’s statement of a world as meaningless has historical location; a
victim of war, Septimus thinks it aﬁer the war, because of the war. His story
provides a post-war vision of modern history as broken images, unable to make
connections.

Written or published at a speciﬁc moment in history when civilization seems
to “progress” only to the verge of falling apart, modernist narratives recognize the
traumatic impact of historical confusion on the human psyche. The essential
modernity of the literature which ﬂourished between the two tragic world wars is
epitomized in these questions: Why should the western civilization that proclaims
itself an agent of progress plunge the world instead to the abyss of destruction?
How should one situate the historical process in the twentieth century? And
having inﬂicted a fatal wound in its own heart, how can civilization rehabilitate
itself? All the modernist texts discussed in this dissertation are not centrally or

explicitly concerned with events at the battleﬁeld; nor are they interested in

describing the obvious consequences of war trauma—soldiers or civilian victims.
Rather the war provides a conﬁrmation, a sense of civilization “progressing” to its
end with no hope of redemption, like a James Joyce’s vision of “the nightmare of
history.” In this sense, ﬁction is “possessed” by history; the oppressions and
conﬂicts of history return from repression and register their violence in the
memory in the form of trauma. Thus, a powerful model of history as tramna can
be found in modernist writing.

Hence, the meaning of this dissertation title “Mixing Memory with Trauma”
refers to the structure of time in the traumatic crisis. It raises the issue of a
historical relation to the past marked by repetition, where repeating is not
remembering but on the contrary testiﬁes to the failure of a certain kind of
memory. The complex structure of traumatic time opens up the possibility of
another kind of memory, a memory of affects, for it is the repetition of the effect
which ensures the continuity of the temporal thread. In formulating modernist
idea of history as trauma, I shall argue in particular that such a notion of
temporality as repetition echoes the structure of time in traumatic crisis. My point
will not be to argue that modernist writing is a traumatic symptom of the war but
to analyze what it means for modernist writers to conceptualize history as the
history of trauma. Here, Cathy Caruth reading of Freud’s much debated
text—Moses and Monotheism—as a history of trauma would help us to see how
an encounter between a crisis in subjective and historical memory can be
theorized in the concept of trauma understood as an event that demonically keeps

haunting the subject in its peculiar form of latency. Informed both by theories of

shock and by the testimonies of survivors of the Holocaust, Caruth’s theory of
trauma provides a psychoanalytic account of the impact of catastrophic historical
events. Trauma is constituted by unassimilated historical experience, but this is
not to suggest that the past is lost to the oblivion of forgetfulness: on the contrary,
history is preserved in the unconscious because it is not resolved and discharged
by the conscious mind.

Before I go on with discussion on the idea of history as trauma, a few words
need to be said about the relationship of modernism and history. Indeed, it may
seem unusual at ﬁrst to link modernist texts with history, for modernism is oﬁen
criticized for retreating into individual consciousness as a means of escaping the
nightmare of history. I argue that modernist literature, rather than retreating into a
defeated wall of self consciousness as traditional reading of modernism would
have it, is preoccupied by a sense of historical crisis. In the wake of trauma, no
thinker, no writer, no serious planner could afford to ignore its deﬁning signatures
on modern consciousness. Images of fragmentation and total destruction
signifying a ﬁacture in time and space have, to borrow a phrase from Samuel
Hynes, “entered post-war consciousness as a truth about the modern world”
(Introduction XI).5 In his much acclaimed work A War Imagined: The First World
War and English Culture, Hynes proposes two ways of imagining the war: one is
to make novels out of the home-front experience of war; another is to respond to
the war without ever mentioning it—“a kind of war writing emptied of history,

but faithful to feeling” (135). Signiﬁcantly, Hynes argues that modernist

 

5 Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: The Bodley
Head, 1990).

fragmentary writing styles bear the same fearful qualities one ﬁnds in
war—dissolution, ﬂux, and ruin compose a vision of Western civilization at the
edge of a vast catastrophe. For Hynes, the works of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia
Woolf, though not directly related to the war, nevertheless serve as representative
of modernist writers’ response to the devastation of war—that is, war separates
the present from the past, creating a gap in history.

Obviously, war trauma has created a sense of discontinuity on modern
consciousness. Such an incomprehensible catastrophe is beyond history’s
comprehension, for history is ill equipped to render the tragic experience of
disintegration of the twentieth century. For Modris Eksteins, history fails to “ﬁnd
explanation to the war that correspond to the horrendous reality, to the actual
experience of the war” (293).6 Close to announcing the death of history, Eksteins
in his work Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
claims that in the face of war characterized by a pervasive disillusion, history,
rather than describing “a social experience, a matter of documentable reality, was
individual nightmare, or even, as the Dadaists insisted, madness” (293). The
burden of rendering the confusion and disorientation of the postwar world falls
into the hands of artists. The magnitude of suffering, past and present, however,
is too overwhelming to be understood. Set against broken memories of a
wounded past, modern artists can attempt only to make a story of what is not a
story, struggling to give shape to individual suffering. But as the extremity of the

situation shown in the accounts of war proves to exceed what can be told in mere

 

6 Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Toronto,
Canada: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1989).

words, Eksteins continues to argue, “only dream and neurosis remained, a world
of illusions characterized by a pervasive negativism. Fantasy became the
mainsng of action, and melancholy the general mood” (293). Similarly, in The
Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell, examining the inﬂuences of the
Great War on modern thought, also describes the war as “perhaps the last to be
conceived as taking place within a seamless, purposeful ‘history’ involving a
coherent stream of time rtmning from past through present to ﬁxture” (121).7 We
have perhaps accustomed to the Fussellian notion of a constitutive relation
between the deep, conceptual trauma caused by the war and the fragmentary,
disorienting nature of high modernism. Taken together, these three cultural
critics—Fussel, Hynes, and Eksteins—all argue that because of history’s failure to
adapt to the excruciating experience of war, modernist literature is proposed as a
more suitable means to render modern sentiments. They, therefore, ascribe a
notion of history to modernism. Taking a cue from these cultural critics, I want to
argue that all the modernist texts examined in this dissertation, although making
no references to historical events of the war, nevertheless assimilate war trauma
and its aftermaths into their world, thus presenting a tragic vision of modern
history. Contrary to these critics’s claim that modernist view of history as either
rupture or discontinuous, I propose to cast the problematic of time in modernist
notion of history in terms of repetition compulsion. A history of trauma,
therefore, is unable to tell a straightforward story of deﬁnite cause and effect.
Rather, the return of trauma disrupts our desire to read history progressing from a

clear-cut beginning to end, and so it demands reformulating history as a discourse

 

7 Paul Fussel, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford UP, 1975).

9

unavailable to rational understanding in the extremity of its conditions. Much like
the unthinkable, shattering nature of trauma, the history of the twentieth century is
viewed by modernist writers as an experience not available to immediate and
conscious understanding.

Limiting my focus to the work of so-called high modernists rather than those
texts that directly address the war will help to expose issues at stake in aesthetic
modernism—namely its artistic forms. A number of critics have identiﬁed the
Great War as a literary watershed, an event that rendered traditional narrative
form inadequate to represent the upheaval and trauma produced by the war.
Examining the relationships among modernist ﬁction, cultural history, and the
Great War, Trudi Tate contends that although “the formal and theoretical aspects
of modernism have been closely analysied . . . its place in the history of its own
time has received surprisingly little attention” (2).8 Hence Tate endeavors to
remark on a resonance between the confusion of the Great War and modernist
narrative form. For his part, Malcom Bradury argues that “many novelists wrote
[the war] into their novels as a sufficient explanation for modern style, for the
spatialisation of form, the jump from the diurnal to the symbolist world, as well as
for their newer, harder techniques of expression, their rapid cutting, their
mechanization of human ﬁgures” (193).9 Compelled to come up with a different
way of conceptualizing historical trauma, modernist narrative employs a peculiar
form of nonlinearity, blurring all distinctions between past, present, and future,

and constant circling around loss to inhabit history through the symptomology of

 

8 Trudi Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester : Manchester UP, 1998).
9 Malcolm Bradbury, The Social Context of Modern English Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP,
1971).

10

trauma. These essentially formal devices manifest not just as aesthetic
representations but as unmediated repetitions of a trauma that has yet to be
worked through.

Whereas Caruth and other critics of trauma studies privilege the role of
belatedness in the concept of trauma,10 thus emphasizing the collapse of
understanding, I want to direct the attention to repetition compulsion that is at the
heart of trauma. It is repetition compulsion that so puzzled Freud that he had to
return to it again and again in order to ﬁgure out why the psyche can be so
perverse as to enjoy repeating unpleasant experiences. In that compulsion to
repeat, Freud speculates, there is likely to be an attempt to replay the situation, to
rewrite the scenario retrospectively for the psyche to achieve some kind of
mastery of the unassimilated image. However, as clinical data show, mastery is
hardly achieved; more disturbingly, the victims in acting out their traumatic
symptoms succeeds only in doing violence to themselves. The psyche actually
gets “stuck” in its own suffering, as reliving the past trauma brings only a sense of

stasis in life. The subject of trauma is unable to move beyond the haunting effects

 

'0 At issue is their emphasis on how trauma eludes comprehension, inaccessible to knowledge and
rational understanding. Whereas Cathy Caruth argues that there is no simple access to the
incomprehensible truth of the latency of trauma, thus challenging the notion of a straightforward
textual referentiality, Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart attempt to address the issue of
memory in trauma. lnfonned by the work of Pierre Janet, they develop a theory of trauma as
deferred effects of a past cause by distinguishing "traumatic memory" from "narrative memory."
Traumatic memory seems to ﬁx the moment permanently in memory of the original event,
immune to the vicissitudes of time but unconsciously getting acted out the past repeatedly. By
contrast, narrative memory refers to ordinary memory by which Janet described as "the action of
telling a story." See their works on trauma in Traumatic Stress: The Eﬂects of Overwhelming
Experience on Mind, Body, and Society, eds. Bessel A. van der Kolk, Alexander C. McFarlane, and
Lars Weisaeth (New York: Guilford, 1996). For their parts, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub
explore the ethical implications of witnessing of the stories of trauma survivors and so they focus
on trauma studies in terms of the question of testimony and witnessing. See Shoshana Felman and
Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London:
Routledge, 1992).

ll

left by trauma, and can only experience in a damaging, repetitive fashion. In
trauma, repetition compulsion establishes a rhythm of futility in which the trauma
survivor structures his life around a single traumatic event that stops forward
movement toward recovery. In this sense, repetition compulsion is associated
with deterioration, erasure, fragmentation, and neurotic violence—all pointing to
a total devastation that strongly suggests symptoms of modernism. Taking
repetition compulsion as a trope for narration in forms of haunting, echoing,
mimicking, and mirroring, I want to investigate how Freud’s writing echoes
modernist concerns with the situation of subjects under the historical pressure of
cultural processes. I argue that ﬁgurations of repetition compulsion employed by
modernist writers echo a crisis in historical consciousness in that the insistent
return of traumatic events disrupts narrative chronology.

Although I aim, in this dissertation, to indicate that modernist literature
deﬁnes the post-traumatic condition by incorporating the fragmented and horriﬁc
effects of trauma on the psyche into their narrative form, it is not my intention to
adopt a single approach to these narratives. As Julian Wolfreys points out, “any
gesture in the direction of regulating a response to trauma or establishing a
methodology or mode of analysis should be resisted, if one is to do justice to
trauma and the work of testimony” (126).11 The impossibility of regulating a set
of rules which determine in advance the approach to traumatic events calls our
attention to the nature of trauma in which cohesion of time and consciousness is

tragically shattered. My readings seek to remain attentive to the nature of

 

" Julian Wolfreys, “Trauma, Testimony, Criticism: Witnessing, Memory and Responsibility” in
Introducing Criticism at the 21" Century, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2002),
126-150.

12

psychological injury and so I am not claiming that modernist writers attempt to
engage with the unresolved experience of trauma in the same way. For example,
Freud sets out to understand “traumatic neurosis” as a phenomenon against the
pleasurable principle but ends up writing the disorder and confusion of the
traumatized psyche into his theory on trauma. Likewise, Virginia Woolf’s
narrative technique, as DeMeester argues, “brilliantly mirrors the mind of a
trauma survivor like Septimus” (650)”, but in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf depicts not
only the chaos of Septimus’s shattered mind but also situates the aﬁermaths of
war trauma in relation to a larger society whose inability to face the disturbing
social implications of war trauma inhibits trauma survivor’s chance of recovery.
Woolf responds to the legacy of shell-shock by focusing more on the cultural,
sociopolitical, and psychological contexts of trauma. Therefore, Mrs. Dalloway
addresses how the mind of traumatized Septimus becomes a historical marker to
unspeakable experience of social conﬂicts and wounds. In what follows, I will
outline how each writer employs the ﬁgure of traumatic repetition in different
ways. I aim to show that the device of repetition-compulsion can act at the levels
of language, imagery or plot.

6

In Chapter II of this project— ‘Limping to History: Trauma and Its
Vicissitudes”—I aim to read Beyond the Pleasure Principle against Moses and
Monotheism. I argue that the conceptual difﬁculties concerning the problem of

psychic trauma that Freud tries in vain to explain away with his earlier formed

instinctual theory in Beyond the Pleasure Principle keep haunting Freud so that

 

'2 Karen DeMeester, “Trauma and Recovery in Virginia Woolt’s Mrs. Dal/away,” Modern Fiction
Studies 44.3 (1998): 649-673.

13

he has to work it through (also in vain) by returning to it in his ﬁnal work—Moses
and Monotheism. Written at a historical crisis, both texts reﬂect a remarkable
similarity in structure in that the unavoidable and overwhelming imposition of
historical events on the psyche mirrors Freud’s internal contradictions and doubt
concerning the survival of psychoanalysis. Freud is fascinated with the pattern of
suffering that characterizes the lives of certain individuals (notably the case of
traumatic neurosis) in that trauma seems to repeat itself for those who have
already passed through them. In coming to terms with the catastrophic symptoms
of trauma, and the subsequent ghostly reappearance by which trauma came to be
comprehended, Freud stumbles on the concept of “repetition compulsion.” And
so he makes a historical departure from war trauma to an analysis of the famous
“fort/da” game. The narrative as well as the theory of trauma thus hover between
repetition and departure, exemplifying the ambivalence and ambiguity of trauma.
In this psychoanalytic encounter with historical trauma, Beyond the Pleasure
Principle has internalized the effects of war trauma. Therefore, the body of the
text itself ﬁgures symptoms of trauma. Freud’s text is, in that sense, not only
haunted by its subject psychic disorder, but the text itself is also paralyzed,
“limping” like his traumatic patients. It is as though psychic trauma represents an
obstacle to psychoanalysis, one that constantly threatens to overturn its most basic
assumptions so that Freud unconsciously writes the symptom unto the textual
body. The inner conﬂict (doubt), the “in-coherence” of reasoning (interruptions,
the fragility of hypotheses, gaps) points to a narrative of traumatic haunting. The

body, in acting out the tragic aspects of the psyche, presents a witness to twentieth

14

century history as trauma. Propelled by the forward drive of repetition (rather
than desire), the textuality of both Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Moses and
Monotheism is itself a form of acting out, a perforrnative discursive act of the
trauma of the twentieth century. Like drama, which has the magical power to
make present rather than to just narrate, both texts set up a correspondence
between rhetoric and psychic process. My reading of Freud’s Beyond the
Pleasure Principle and Moses and Monotheism seeks to demonstrate that both
texts replicate the literary techniques associated with the genre of trauma
narratives. In this respect, both texts “act out” what I would call textual
traumatism which performs the haunting effects of trauma. In this sense, the text
performs a double to its traumatic hero; likewise, the hero’s disorder is mirrored
by the morbid condition of the narrative system.

Extending Freud’s traumatic vision of the twentieth century to the discussion
of modernist texts that follow, I propose to read Lawrence’ 5 Women in Love as a
response to the devastation of the First World War. Women in Love is a novel
replete with physical injuries and violence which ﬁnd their equivalents in textual
evidence—the novel’s highly-charged violent language peculiarly recalls the
explosive consciousness under the pressure of historical trauma. In fact, during
those years of writing Women in Love, the Great War was much on Lawrence’s
mind: not as military events but as the apocalyptic ending of a sick civilization. “1
think there in no future for England,” he wrote in a letter in November 1915:
“. ...only a decline and fall. That is the dreadful and unbearable part of it: to have

been born into a decadent era, a decline of life, a collapsing civilization.” And in

February 1916: “This world of ours has got to collapse now, in violence and
injustice and destruction, nothing will stop it” (qtd. in Eksteins 435). Nowhere is
such human tendency to self-destruction more visible than in the novel’s
language. I want to stress that Women in Love records trauma at its most basic
lexical levels, through the very choice of words by which the attempt at
representation takes place. Thus, one aspect of Lawrence’s writing situates the
responsible act in the materiality of the letter in order to respond to the disturbing
and chaotic history during World War 1. Thus Women in Love demonstrates that
words have literal violence in that words whiz like metaphorical shells through
the battleﬁeld of discourse between characters. This Chapter—“The Dynamic
Principle of the Oxymoron in Women in Love”—will discuss how Lawrence uses
oxymoron not only as a rhetorical trope but also as an organizing ﬁgure for
trauma to testify both the limit and inadequacy of representation in the face of

catastrophe and horror, and the importance of bearing witness to the fact.

The modernist narrative form of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway arguably emulates
the distinct traumas of modern experience, introducing ideas foregrounding
historical rupture, decentering, fragmentation, erasure of identity. However,
Chapter IV will take a departure from the traumatic performance of narrative form
and focus instead on key issues in the aﬁermath of traumatic experience. I argue
that Mrs. Dalloway offers a version of history as haunting, in which the effects of
the war are far from over. The central, most traumatic violence of the twentieth
century is not mentioned in the novel, because for Woolf modern history is

incomplete and unassimilated—a record that has not yet been adequately made.

By its very nature, the condition of trauma presents an inability to integrate
experience into narrative memory. The traumatic event is always reconstructed in
retrospect; when it occurs, it is only a silent or screaming gap, wound, or void. At
a radical loss for a way of coming to terms with their experience, the traumatized,
as Cathy Caruth writes, “carry an impossible history within them, or they become
themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess” (4-5).'3

As we shall see in Mrs. Dalloway, the symptom of history as unclaimed trauma
returns to the text, simultaneously disrupting narrative development and also
demanding attention, like an open wound. Trauma therefore serves to introduce
the problem of the relation of narrative to remembering and forgetting and to the
special type of forgetting—unexpected and precipitous—that is called
dissociation. In Chapter IV—“Remember My Party” through Trauma: the War
and the Politics of Memory in Mrs. Dalloway”—I discuss the problematic issue of
memory in narrative of trauma. Written in the wake of the traumatic event of
World War I, this novel comments and critiques our need for a past which is easily
packaged and resolved. I argue that postwar British society is troubled by the
overwhelming ﬂood of dangerous emotions resulting from the traumatic impact of
an event on the scale of World War I. The society, eager to leave the traumatic
historical event behind, attempts to contain and suppress the traumatic memory
embodied in the damaged psyche of Septimus as if the text is trying to bind the
large amounts of stimulus from breaching the ego’s protective shield. “Binding”
and “breaching” of course recall Freud’s description in Beyond the Pleasure

Principle of the important function of the psychical apparatus in binding the

 

’3 Cathy Caruth, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995).

I7

destructive external quantities of excitation in order to master them. The novel
demonstrates the losses attending severe war trauma and the costs of denying
trauma, both to the individual and to the community. Representing the nightmare
of history as well as the troubling and unresolved effects of the past, Septimus is
subtly encouraged by the society to kill himself so that the past can be resolved
and forgotten. However, my reading indicates that the novel’s ending as a long-
waited discharge of traumatic excitations in the wake of Septimus’s death does
offer consolation; instead, the ending is deceptive. Though written off physically
from the novel, Septimus returns to ghostly haunt Mrs. Dalloway’s party. Central
in all this is Virginia Woolf’s encryption of a “nonconceptual” density of trauma
within discourse, a real kernel whose presence is a sign that the present haunted

by the wounds of the past still suffers from some traumatic disorder.

Much like Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, the textual body of Under the
Volcano seems to remember the chaos of culture as the rhetorical style responds to
the situation of subjects under the historical pressure of cultural process. The
novel is perhaps the best portrayal of how a theory of traumatic history is
presupposed in the experience of personal trauma. Toward the end of the novel,
we read “[b]ut there was nothing there: no peaks, no life, no climb. Nor was this
summit a summit exactly: it had no substance, no ﬁrm base. It was crumbling
too, whatever it was, collapsing . . . it was in eruption, yet no, it wasn’t the
volcano, the world itself was bursting . . . with himself falling through it all,
through the inconceivable pandemonium of a million tanks, through the blazing of

ten million burning bodies, falling, into a forest, falling—“ (Under the Volcano

18

375). This is an apocalyptic vision the Consul has of a world crumbling down
with him when he is shot by a Fascist policeman in Mexico. In linking the
downfall of the Consul with the breakdown of civilization in the twentieth
century, Malcolm Lowry in Under the Volcano is reﬂecting a tragic despair of
history seen through the shattered and distorted mind of an individual. Written in
the context of the Europe of the 19203 and 19303 when the world was trying to
recover from the horrendous aﬁermaths of the ﬁrst world war while at the same
time anticipating another more cruel and madder war, Under the Volcano
conﬁrms an historical vision as the extreme agent of destruction and horror shared

by many modernist writers who also wrote in the wake of a world-aﬁer-the-war.

The vicious circularity identiﬁed in the Consul’s own personal history is, in
fact, a general condition, at least for the modern West. Certainly Lowry himself,
in his letter to Jonathan Cape, lends support to this reading, arguing that the novel,
on one plane at least, is a chronicle of “the universal drunkenness of mankind
during the war, or during the period immediately preceding it, which is almost the
same thing, and what profundity and ﬁnal meaning there is in [the Consul’s] fate
should be seen also in its universal relationship to the ultimate fate of mankind”
(qtd. in DeCoste 774).14 Read in this light, the Consul’s drinking problem is not a
history of an addiction to alcohol, but in its very repetition, the drinking serves as
an image for the twentieth-century history conceived as a nightmarish cycle of
human waste. Under the Volcano asks this question: What does it mean for

civilization compulsively to drink itself to the verge of madness/violence?

 

" Damon Marcel DeCoste, “Do You Remember Tomorrow?”: Modernism and Its Second War in
Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano,” Modern Fiction Studies 44.3 (1998): 767-791.

19

Drunkenness is therefore the structuring trope of the whole novel. The concept of
drunkenness as discursive trauma, elaborated in Chapter V1, is central to my
argument. I want to investigate how the use of states of vertigo, sensory disorder,
circularity, all of which are associated with drunkenness, betrays a complicity
with the malady of death characterized by the Consul’s narcissistic ﬁxation on

loss.

20

Chapter II: Limping to History: Trauma and Its Vicissitudes

The disturbing phenomenon of trauma is a central concern in Freud’s Beyond the
Pleasure Principle and Moses and Monotheism. Written at a time when Freud was
struggling with an internal crisis (the aging process compounded by his cancer) as well as
external conﬂicts (events surrounding the two world wars), both works document how
history gets entangled with psychical trauma. Facing the newly discerned perturbations
of mind that he categorizes as “the compulsion to repeat” that is the hallmark of trauma,
Freud structures his writing on trauma around a diabolical movement which like trauma
is interminably repeating the wound of history. Considered in relation to their historical
contexts, these two works assume a particular poignancy and relevance. Reading Beyond
the Pleasure Principle against Moses and Monotheism, I want to use F reud’s theory of
trauma proposed in these two works to illuminate his own writing. In the course of
reading Freud using his own trauma theory, I shall argue that both Beyond the Pleasure
Principle and Moses and Monotheism belong to “the emerging genre of trauma ﬁction”
(Whitehead 4).1 Such a notion of turning trauma theory into trauma narrative indicates a
shift from a reﬂective mode of writing to a performative act in which the text inscribes
traumatic symptoms. In other words, I want to argue that while both works concern
about the registration of a traumatic experience in the epistemological crisis of human
psyche, the text itself enacts trauma of narrative in that the body of both works mimics
the impact of trauma.

1. Beyond the Pleasure Principle

 

' In her Trauma Fiction, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004), Anne Whitehead deﬁnes trauma ﬁction as that
which “the impact of trauma can only adequately be represented by mimicking its forms and symptoms, so
that temporality and chronology collapse, and narratives are characterized by repetition and indirection”

(4)-

21

An Unexpected Encounter of Psychoanalysis and War Trauma

The First World War both conﬁrmed and contradicted Freud’s psychoanalytic
theories about human nature. The war proved right his theories about the irrational nature
of human beings; at the same time, it also revealed to Freud that his theory of sexuality
rendered false in the wake of the epidemic of war trauma. However, the First World War
had also seen many doctors adopting the method of psychoanalysis in their attempt at
ﬁnding a cure for trauma victims. In a paradoxical way, psychoanalysis found a shelter
in history. Hence, when the dark war ended, Freud lamented in November of 1918, “Our
analysis has actually also had trouble. No sooner does it begin to interest the world on
account of the war neuroses than the war ends . . . . Our kingdom is indeed not of this
world” (qtd. in Breger 250).2 Little did Freud think that lasting mental illness would be
of one of the results of the war. He wrote in his introduction to the report of the Fifth
International Psycho-Analytical Congress that “when war conditions ceased to operate,
the greater number of the neurotic disturbances brought about by the war simultaneously
vanished. The opportunity for a thorough investigation of these affections was thus
unluckily lost” (XVII, 207).3 What Freud considered as an unlucky loss of an opportunity
turned out to be a chance for him to reconsider the validity of his early theory of the
human psyche as automatically regulated by the pleasure principle. The War brought
home tremendous numbers of traumatized soldiers whose bewildering behavior of
repeatedly returning to the scene of wounding puzzled Freud. In 1919, when Freud
began writing Beyond the Pleasure Principle (henceforth cited as Beyond), he was

responding to a historical trauma that challenged his theory of the pleasure principle.

 

2 Louis Breger, Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000).
3 See The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychoanalytic Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James
Strachey, V. XVII (London: The Hogarth P, 1955).

22

Freud wonders: If the human psyche constantly and fundamentally seeks pleasure, why
then do some people repeat in the present what hurt in the past, that which could never be
felt as pleasurable? And above all, why do the traumatized soldiers relive the horrors of
the battleﬁeld?

This unexpected encounter between psychoanalysis and war trauma pushes Freud
to modify his theory of the pleasure principle. In Beyond, he deliberately searches for
examples that run contrary to the pleasure principle. Of all the divergent examples that
Freud gives—the shell-shocked soldier, the accident survivor, the patient acting out their
trauma in transference, people repeating their painful fate, and the child losing sight of its
mother—only war trauma seriously challenges his theory of the pleasure principle. It is a
special case that really explains “beyond” the limits of his theory: a case that haunts
Freud throughout Beyond, because the soldier’s dreams did not accord with his theory of
wish fulﬁllment, according to which every dream represents, in disguised or altered form,
an unconscious wish or desire. Trying to account for the meaning of the soldier’s
nightmares that reﬂect a stubborn return to the scene of trauma, Freud in Beyond shifts
the center of psychoanalytic thinking from the individual struggle with internal infantile
sexual desire to the external, collective painful encounter with traumatic history. Thus
Cathy Caruth writes that “the question raised by war trauma concerning the nature of life
thus require a new model for psychoanalytic thinking and, in particular, for the relation
between psychoanalysis and history” (Caruth 52; 2003).4 However, Freud ﬁnds it
impossible to focus on the adult traumatic experience as a reformulated model for the

human psyche; the pleasure principle proves strong enough to pull Freud back to its own

 

’ Cathy Caruth, “Parting Words: Trauma, Silence, and Survival,” in Acts of Narrative, eds. Carol Jacobs
and Henry Sussman (Stanford: Stanford U P, 2003), 45-62.

23

track. The reserve direction holds equally true, however; in a way, Beyond can also be
interpreted as Freud’s inability to defend the supposed primacy of the human psyche to
seek pleasure, for the historical trauma keeps intruding without warning the present life.
The book therefore records not only the oxymoronic structure of the human psyche but
also the oxymoronic movement of the narrative in which distinctions between inside and
outside, progress and stasis, past and present, life and death, are rendered problematic.5
The following discussion will start with Freud’s deﬁnition of trauma and then will use his
definition to read the story of war trauma in Beyond.

Although Freud writes Beyond with the intention of exploring traumatic neurosis
as another principle that works independently of the dominant pleasure principle, it is
only with hesitance and taking many turns and twists before he can bring himself to
formulate a deﬁnition of trauma:

We describe as “traumatic” any excitations from outside which are
powerful enough to break through the protective shield. It seems
to me that the concept of trauma necessarily implies a connection
of this kind with a breach in an otherwise efficacious barrier
against stimuli. Such an event as an external trauma is bound to
provoke a disturbance on a large scale in the functioning of the

organism’s energy and to set in motion every possible defensive

 

5 The cyclic reasoning Freud uses to argue for a principle beyond the pleasure principle has led many critics
to see the book as an awkward performance of writing. In this respect, the collective resentment is at times,
as Todd Dufresne points out, “almost audible: If only Freud had died before his annoying new revisions of
1920” (26). Beyond the Pleasure Principle sits uneasily among F reud’s other works. The critical history of
the book has been ﬁaught with puzzlement and speculations on the validity of his claims in the book.
Dufresne has provided an excellent genealogy of the critical history of the book-—see his Tales from the
Freudian Crypt: The Death Drive in Text and Context (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000). See especially his
Chapter 2, “The Heterogeneous “Beyond” : An Introduction to the Dead and Dying,” (I3-I44) in which he
provides a “review and reconstruction, an archaeology of BPP in general, and of the theory of the death
drive in particular” (13-14). There are, it seems, many 'Beyonds' in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

24

measure. (33)6
These terms—powerful excitations, breaking through the barrier, and emotional
disturbance—indicate the notion of trauma as an event that overwhelms mental processes
by being too sudden or extreme for the psyche to accommodate and process:I The
psyche, being unprepared and shocked by the accident, has missed the chance to contain
and negotiate traumatic fright. The meeting of psyche and trauma paradoxically reveals a
missed encounter between them where the psyche helplessly witnesses its own damage.
Not knowing why such damage could ever occur, the psyche repeatedly acts out the scene
of trauma in nightmares, ﬂashbacks, and hallucinations. Freud describes such an
enacting of trauma as “repetition-compulsion” by which he speculates as the psyche’s
attempt in retrospect to master disturbing mental ailment:
It is not in the service of [the pleasure principle] that the dreams of
patients suffering from traumatic neurosis lead them back with such
regularity to the situation in which the trauma occurred. We may assume,
rather, that dreams are here helping to carry out another task, which must
be accomplished before the dominance of the pleasure principle can even
begin. These dreams are endeavouring to master the stimulus
retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause

of the traumatic neurosis. (36-37)

 

6 All quotations from Beyond the Pleasure Principle are from the Norton edition of the book. See Sigmund
Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed., James Strachey; intro. Gregory Zilboorg; with a
biographical introduction by Peter Gay ( New York : Norton, 1989).

7 For her part, Caruth extends Freud’s notion of trauma and describes it as “a response, sometimes delayed,
to an overwhelming event or set of events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations,
dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event” (Caruth 4-5; 1995). The pathology, she notes,
consists “solely in the structure of the experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced
fully at the time, but only belatedly in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it” (46). See
Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1995).

25

However, repeatedly revisiting the scene of trauma is more susceptible to self-destruction
than it is a mastery of events. As Freud puts it, “I am not aware, however, that patients
suffering from traumatic neurosis are much occupied in their waking lives with memories
of their accident. Perhaps they are more concerned with not thinking of it” (11; italics in
original). The implications and horror of trauma point to a ﬁxation to the moment at
which the trauma occurred. It is in this sense that Freud notes the distinctive feature of
traumatic dreams in that they represent a re-entry into the experience itself: “[The
patient] is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience, instead
of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the
past” (19; emphasis mine). The soldiers whom Freud observes have not fully assimilated
their experiences of war, and their nightmares represent the ways in which the past acts as
a haunting or possessive force. Freud notes the soldiers trapped within their nightmares:
“The impression they give is of being pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some
“daemonic power” (41). To reproduce the trauma in the state of repeating it does not
mean to remember, to narrate, or to represent a past event as past. It means to re-live the
past event in the present, thus disrupting the psyche’s experience of time. In its disturbed
and disrupted temporality, trauma, for Freud, carries a ghostly or spectral meaning in
which it represents the haunting of the individual by an image or event and testiﬁes to an
unresolved past. In telling the story of the traumatized soldier, Freud gestures towards a
past that haunts the present and resists assimilation. Trauma brutalizes not only the
psyche; in trauma, it is time itself that gets wounded.8

The repetition of traumatic experiences in the dreams of neurotics is a vain effort

 

8 Allan Young also notes the wounding of time in trauma; for him, trauma is “a disease of time” (7). See
Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder (New Jersey: Princeton
UP, 1995).

26

to reverse time back to its past experience of pleasure before trauma. Trauma therefore
raises the issue of a relation to the past marked by repetition compulsion, where reliving
the past is not remembering but on the contrary makes cure a rare case in trauma, for the
aim of psychoanalysis is to make the patient remember, to work-through in order to
elaborate the memory and thereby to stop repeating. And this traumatic resistance to
therapy moves Freud’s thinking in the direction of a biological “death drive.” The death
drive is the legitimate “beyond” that acts independently of and often in opposition to the
pleasure principle. The proposition of the death drive also moves Freud beyond the
discussion of war trauma and triggers a series of peculiar speculations on the function and
validity of the death drive, speculations that can be brought to an end only when Freud
forces a bold and dire conclusion that “the pleasure principle seems actually to serve the
death instincts” (77).9 \Vrth this conclusion, the project of Beyond which aims to address

traumatic repetition that works against “the dominance of the pleasure principle over the

 

9 The conclusion Freud reaches about the relation of the pleasure principle to the death drive arouses more
confusion than clarity in explaining the meaning of the death drive. For this reason, the proposition of the
death drive has puzzled and annoyed critics for decades. While many critics dismiss the death drive simply
as Freud’s fantasy, others see it as Freud’s attempt to “displace the monistic theory that posited the
achievement of real or conjectured pleasure as the primary goal of human activity with a dualistic theory
which claims that the drive toward pleasure is always interrupted and thwarted by a rival drive, that of
death or Thanatos” (Butler 260). See Judith Butler, “The Pleasure of Repetition,” in Pleasure Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, eds. Robert A. Click and Stanley Bone (New Haven: Yale UP, 1990), 259-276. For
Dufresne (see note 5 for information on his work) , the death drive “is a meta-theory, and also a threat, that
undermines the theory, practice, and business of psychoanalysis from within” (25). Dufresne continues:
“The death drive became for Freud a repository into which he could dump everything that didn’t ﬁt well in
the categories of sexuality or libido” (34). On the other hand, Liﬁon’s study of trauma survivors of the
Nuclear Bombing in Japan conﬁrms in a painful way Freud’s theory of the death drive. Litton writes:
“Numbing and overall constriction in depression are so predominant that, among psychic disorders, it
comes closest to organismic imitation of death, to what we might call a mimetic death" (Litton 181). See
Jay Robert Litton, The Broken Connection: 0n Death and the Continuity of Life (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1979). Perhaps the most vehement proponents of the death drive are Melanie Klein and her
followers. Melanie Klein and her school model on the inherent nature of aggression in human beings by
which she means the manifestation of the death drive: “The repeated attempts that have been made to
improve humanity—in particular to make it more peaceable,” Klein wrote in 1933, “have failed, because
nobody has understood the full depth and vigour of the instincts of aggression innate in each individual”
(257). See Melanie Klein, “The Early Development of Conscience in the Child,” in Love, guilt, and
reparation, and other works, 1921-1945 (New York : Free Press, 1984).

27

course of mental processes” has come full circle: Freud falls back on the function of the
pleasure principle. This peculiar writing style in Beyond has attracted much critical
interest. In his book The Post Card, Derrida has noted of the performative structure of
Freud’s text: “The very procedure of the text itself is diabolical. It mirnes walking, does
not cease walking without advancing, regularly sketching out one step more without
gaining an inch for ground” (269). As such, Freud plays a game of “repetition of
repetition” (Derrida 302).lo Similarly, Zilboorg argues that Freud’s acts of speculation
advances without advancing : “Beyond the Pleasure Principle is what it says; it goes a
little further beyond, but it does not abandon whatever preceded it” (xxxi). '1 Aware of
the curious rhetoric of Beyond, Freud admits that such a theory “raises a host of other
questions to which we can at present ﬁnd no answer” (57-8). Beyond ends with these
famous lines: “What we cannot reach ﬂying we must reach limping” and “The book tells
us it is no sin to limp.” Freud expressly connects the limp with “the slow advances of our
scientiﬁc knowledge,” but it is impossible not to apply the metaphor to the faltering
exposition of the work.

I would like to suggest that this “limping” back to the pleasure principle indicates
simultaneously an evasion of a historical trauma that still remains painful in
contemporary experience as well as a response to the trauma by mimicking its
disorientation and its symptomatic dimensions at a stylistic level. Freud’s text, in
limping between a logical impasse where life and death get entangled, testiﬁes to the fact

that trauma cannot be mastered: it continues to lie outside or alongside the “integrated”

 

'0 Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1987).

" Gregory Zilboorg, “Introduction,” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed.,
James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989), xxv-xxxvi.

28

ego. In this sense, Beyond is as paralyzed, “limping” as his traumatic patients, for trauma
presents an incomprehensible catastrophe that undermines the very possibility of coherent
narrative. The “diabolical” repetitions in Beyond may appear as symptoms of historical
events that have not been adequately addressed, remembered, and retold. In the
following, I will argue that Freud inscribes within his text, in the words of Caruth, “a
pathology of history” in which Beyond textualizes a narrative of the shattered psyche’s
response to historical trauma.12
Limping to Narrative-as-Trauma

Freud’s deﬁnition of trauma signiﬁcantly points to the contingency of external
reality disturbing the inner order of the psyche. In this sense, trauma is deﬁned as a
puncturing which disrupts a certain order by breaking its boundaries and creating chaos
in its structures. The encounter between psychoanalysis and the war neuroses shows
Freud confronting the survivors of trauma and both seeing and turning away from what
he saw, because the incessant repetition of traumatic dreams serve only to disrupt his
masterplot—the psyche’s tendency to repeat pleasant experience. No sooner does Freud
address the issue of war trauma than he expresses a wish to return to his pleasure
principle: “At this point I propose to leave the dark and dismal subject of the traumatic
neurosis and pass on to examine the method of working employed by the mental
apparatus in one of its earliest normal activities—I mean in children’s play” (12). Thus
he begins to discuss the meaning of the famous “fort/da” game. The actor of this game is

no one than his grandson who has the habit of throwing away a reel, uttering “o-o-o-o”,

 

'2 Referring to traumatic disruption of temporality and chronology, Caruth writes: “If [trauma] must be
understood as a pathological symptom, then it is not so much a symptom of the unconscious, as it is a
symptom of history” (5). See Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1995).

29

and then pulling it back. Freud explains that the child in question is actively turning the
painful experience of his mother’s departure into a game in which he can make his
mother return, thus joyfully uttering “da” when he retrieves the toy. In this departure
from the historical trauma into a children’s game which also turns out to be a family
romance, Freud unknowingly juxtaposes two stories—the historical trauma and the
personal drama. However, Freud is unable to focus his attention on either of the story, for
those two stories seem to simultaneously disrupt and connect each other.

At this point it is pertinent to consider a small alteration Freud made on
transcribing the sound accompanying the throwing away of the reel by his grandson.
Grubrich-Smitis’s careful study of the two manuscript versions of Beyond notes that in
the ﬁrst version the phonetic transcription of the throwing away sound is 9999, whereas
in the second version, Freud “onomatopoetically extended the sequence of vowels in
writing as follows: o-o-o-o” (188).13 I would like to suggest that this textual strategy of
transforming from “m” to “o-o-o-o” enacts the paradoxical wound of narrative, for
those dashes/links can be interpreted as symptoms of trauma in that the story of war
trauma is told by indirectness, repetition compulsion, and fragmentation. In terms of
narrative indirectness, we recall that Freud’s difficulty in ﬁtting the post-traumatic
dreams into the plot of the pleasure principle prompts him to break off the enigmatic
dreams abruptly and continue with the analysis of the child’s “gone/there” play. In this
sense, the story of war trauma seems to perform narrative obstacles in this text, for the
text fails to relay the story in a narrative continuum of past, present, and future; in other

words, the conventional narrative framework has been disintegrated. In trauma, the

 

'3 Ilse Grubrich-Sirnitis, Back to Freud 's Texts: Making Silent Documents Speak, trans. Philip Slotkin (New
Haven: Yale UP, 1996).

30

narrative framework is cut off by a dreadful event or crisis. Freud responds to this
interruptive nature of post-traumatic dreams by referring to them at least nine times, and
in different places, in the course of attempting to go beyond the pleasure principle.'4 The
many false starts to attempt to narrate the meaning of war trauma reveal Freud’s inability
to resist the compulsion to repeat that story, and this interrupted but repetitive return to
the story of war trauma embodies what Irene Kacandes terms as “narrative-as-trauma”
(57).15

The traversal between external historical trauma and internal psychic states
represents the historiality of the text’s attempt to respond to the traumatic reception of
new knowledge; it also generates a narrative of repetition compulsion in that post-
traumatic dreams both sustain the ﬂow of the narrative and yet interrupt the narrative at
every point. Freud’s difﬁculty in working through the “narrative-as-trauma” attests to the
technical difficulty concerning trauma spoken of by Avital Ronell, for trauma can be seen
as a memory that “one cannot integrate [it] into one’s own experience, and as a
catastrophic knowledge that one cannot communicate to others” (313-14).16 The inability
to communicate a catastrophic knowledge can be seen as a narrative obstacle; not

surprisingly, one of such narrative obstacles in this text occurs at crucial dramatic

 

'4 The war-related story is scattered throughout the book. Freud ﬁrst mentions the nightmares of war in
Chapter II but then leaves the subject to talk about other examples. At the beginning of Chapter 111, he
again mentions the phenomenon of war trauma and then near the end of Chapter III, he tries to relate the
compulsion to repeat traumatic dreams to the repetition of children’s play. In Chapter IV, Freud proposes
that trauma is a break in the stimulus barrier and continues to speculate on the function of post-traumatic
dreams. The line of speculation on the notion of war trauma culminates in Chapter V in which Freud
regards trauma as a failure to bind excitations. From here on, the narrative digresses from the plot of war
trauma to an elaboration of the duality of the drive theory.

'5 Kacandes argues that we can think about “narratives ‘of trauma, but also about narratives ‘as’ trauma”
(55). See her “Narrative Witnessing As Memory Work: Reading Gertrud Kolmar’s A Jewish Mother” in
Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, eds. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer
(Hanover: UP of New England, 1999), 55-75.

’6 Avital Ronell, F initude ’s Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium (Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P,
1994).

31

junctures and around the most painful issues: the proposition of the death drive in
connection with the death of Freud’s daughter, Sophie. Of course, Freud dismissed such
a connection, asserting that Beyond had been completed before this traumatic event.
However, Grubrich-Simitis argues that Freud’s loss of his daughter Sophie and of his
friend Anton von Freund colored the ideas advanced in Beyond.17 She compares two
separate versions of Beyond, the ﬁrst completed before and the second after the deaths.
The second version, the one that was published, contains a chapter not present in the ﬁrst
version; it is in this chapter that the concept of the death drive ﬁrst appears.18

F reud’s denial of any relationship between the death drive and the death of his
daughter can be interpreted as his inability to directly verbalize the pain of personal loss,
a fact that the text itself bears witness to, for Freud adds an odd footnote to the discussion
of the “fort/da” game. The note reads: “When this child was ﬁve and three-quarters, his
mother died. Now that she was really ‘gone’ (‘o-o-o’), the little boy showed no signs of
grief. It is true that in the interval a second child had been born and had roused him to
violent jealousy” (16). Signiﬁcantly in this note, one “o” is missing from the original
four o’s—“o-o-o-o”—that appears in the main text. Recall that Sophie is precisely the
mother of the child whose joyful play ends with the loss of his mother, a tragedy that
occurs outside of the text, I would like to suggest that this note unmistakably disrupts the

division between extemality and intemality. The juxtaposition of the nightmares of war

to the child’s game carries a “limping effect.” The juxtaposition is even more compelling

 

'7 See note 13..

'8 The text of Beyond was written with many interruptions. It was begun in March, 1919, and the ﬁrst draft
was completed in May. Freud started to work on it again during the winter of 1920 and ﬁnished the book
after making several revisions in July, 1920. The writing of the book is fraught with the historical weight
and personal loss in that the many interruptions and returns to the text inscribe Freud’s traumatized
consciousness. For Freud’s life situations surrounding the writing of Beyond, see Peter Gay, Freud: A Life
for Our Time (New York : Norton, 1988).

32

if we note that Sophie died of the inﬂuenza epidemic that originated in the war, and so
her death brings us to a point where historical trauma and personal loss are closely
interrelated. Beyond is a narrative that wrestles with the entanglement of history,
collective and personal, and the text arguably bears the hallmarks of traumatic narrative
unable to escape its own condition, doomed to mirror the iterable interruption that haunts
it throughout.

This marked interruption and doubling that produces a discontinuous narrative-as-
trauma insists on acting it out even toward the end of Beyond in which Freud “lirnps” to a
conclusion with a quote from a poet:

Was man nicht erfliegen kann, muss man erhinken.

Die Schrift sagt, es ist keine Sunde zu hinken. (78)]9
Appearing amid the English translation, those German words unknowingly embody the
otherness of trauma that remains unassimilated and unnarratable. More telling are those
limping dots which evoke the symptomatic dimensions at a literal level. The repetition of
traumatic performance on the level of the text produces the disorientation of trauma-a3-
narrative in which it seems to threaten to limp to a psychic paralysis and is suggestive of
the endless drive to repeat. In many ways, this limping is unequivocally applicable to the
text of Moses and Monotheism.
11. Moses and Monotheism
Writing at a time of internal contradictions and doubt, as well as at a time of

historical crisis, Freud’s Moses and Monotheism astonishingly bears the traits that we

 

‘9 James Strachey, translator and editor of Beyond, did not explain the choice to let these two lines remain
in German in the main text. He included the English translation in the footnote: “What we cannot reach
ﬂying we must reach limping . . . . The book tells us it is no sin to limp” (78).

33

ﬁnd in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Just as the total newness and unexpectedness of
traumatic dreams presents a situation that does ﬁt into the wish-fulﬁllment theory of
dreams, so does Freud pr0pose in Moses and Monotheism (hereafter cited as MM) a
theory of the origins of Jewish history in apparent contradiction of any official history.

Moses and Monotheism is a book of memory in which Freud, playing the double
roles of the patient whose job is to remember and the analyst whose job is to construct,
attempts to remember what official and historical memory has forgotten. Determined to
retrace the forgotten memory so as to understand the events happening in the present,
Freud, through speculations, historical ﬁctionalizing, and psychological analogies, argues
that Moses was not a Jew but an Egyptian nobleman by birth, and that he introduced
Monotheism invented by Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten. However, the crude Hebrews,
unable to bear its rigorous standards of belief, rebelled against Moses and murdered him.
After centuries of collective repression, Moses’s monotheistic teachings managed to
surface and become the national religion of the Jews.

What to make of this controversial and shocking conclusion that the history of the
Hebrews is founded on a trauma that relates to the murder of the father—the murder of
Moses by his people? In a letter to Arnold Zweig dated 9 September, 1934, Freud writes:

Faced with the new persecutions, one asks oneself again how the
Jews have come to be what they are and why they should have
attracted this undying hatred. I soon discovered the formula:
Moses created the Jews. So I gave my work the title: The Man

Moses, a Historical Novel. . . . (qtd. in Yerushalmi 1989;377)20

 

2° Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “Freud on the ‘Historical Novel’: From the Manuscript Draft (1934) of Moses
and Monotheism,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 70 (1989): 375-96.

34

In this letter, Freud unequivocally links the writing of MM as a response to the “new
persecutions” unleashed against the Jews by the Nazis. However, such an imagined
construction of a traumatic history as a response to a historical trauma has invited critical
speculations on Freud’s personal life.21 Aware of how shockingly opposite this
construction is to everything consciously remembered and transmitted, Freud claims that
Moses and .Monotheism aims “at a new concept of truth, that is under the name of
‘historical truth’, a truth that scholarship, historiography, and perhaps philosophy have
some difficulty thinking through” (32).22 The “historical truth” Freud refers to has
nothing to do with ‘historical objective evidence” but is concerned with psychological
eﬂects by which Freud hopes to shed some light on why the Jewish people “should
incidentally earn the heartfelt dislike of other peoples” (67).

Of all the three essays in MM, only the third and most substantial essay (Part III)
in which Freud has Moses murdered proves dangerously outrageous. The ﬁrst two
essays—“Moses an Egyptian” and “If Moses Was an Egyptian”—do not cause speciﬁc
troubles for Freud, for as many scholars have observed, the hypothesis of Moses as an

Egyptian has been entertained since the 18th century. And as Robert Alter argues, it is not

 

2' Lack of biographical, literary, and logical evidence for the murder of Moses has troubled both Freud and
its critics. The only way left to salvage this peculiar book seems to psychoanalyze the founder of
psychoanalysis himself. Since the critical list of what Yerushalmi calls as “tired and evasive cliche” is long
and well-known, I will not repeat such a cliche. There is a trend, since the publication of Yerushalmi’s
Freud ’3 Moses, to shift the critical attention to the application of Freud’s ideas on traumatic history,
tradition, and transgenerational traits to cultural studies. For Yerushalmi, Moses and Monotheism is
Freud’s positive affirmation of Jewishness, the resolution to his life-long fascination with religion and
Judaism. See Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud ’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and lnterminable (New
Haven: Yale UP, 1991). On the positive evaluation of Freud’s ideas on inherited national traits, see Richard
J. Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998). Robert A. Paul’s Moses
and Civilization: The Meaning Behind Freud ’s Myth (New Haven: Yale UP, 1996), also initiate a change in
approach from psychological motivation and meaning to an understanding of the text itself. Assmann,
using historic texts on the subject of the biblical character of Moses, applied his knowledge of Egyptology
to the same end. See Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism
(Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997).

22 All quotations from Moses and Monotheism are from Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans.
Katherine Jones (New York: Vintage Books, 1955).

35

strictly necessary to Freud’s argument that Moses be an Egyptian. Alter writes: “The
same plot of the murdered leader, the guilty repression of the act, and the subterranean
preservation of his doctrine could be worked out if Moses were a Hebrew who had
merely picked up his new teaching form the Egyptian or even had invented it himself ”
(49).23 But why does Freud insist that Moses be an Egyptian and that the monotheistic
idea entirely derived from the religious innovations of Akhenaten? I want to argue that in
insisting that Mosaic monotheism be an Egyptian one and the origins of Jewish history
based on a murder, Freud, paradoxically, is trying to work through the mystery and the
trauma of anti-Semitism. At a tragic historical juncture, Freud’s Moses and Monotheism
does not aim to provoke his fellow Jews; instead, it carries a ray of hope that will bring a
possible working-through of trauma.

In demonstrating at all costs that Moses, an aristocratic Egyptian, imposes the
monotheism of an Egyptian origin on the Jewish people, Freud does violence to the
available historical evidence, but such a violence carries an effect of desperateness to ﬁnd
a solution for his troubled times. For all the scandal of distorting the Biblical narrative, in
tracing the traumatic beginnings of monotheism back to Egypt, Freud is sending a
message to those who “excel in the practice of anti-Semitism” (117) that it is not the Jew
but the intolerable monotheism of an Egyptian origin that have attracted the undying
hatred. This is also Assmann’s point when he suggests that the Akhenaten version of
monotheistic religion is exclusively intolerant and counter-religious: “It is this hatred
brought about by Akhenaten’s revolution that informs the Judeophobic texts of antiquity”

(167).24

 

23 Robert Alter, “Freud’s Jewish Problem,” Commentary 93.1 (1992): 48-52.
2’ Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge: Harvard

36

At one point of trying to apply individual trauma to collective trauma,

Freud distinguishes two kinds of trauma: positive and negative. The former endeavors to

live through it by repeating it in terms of “ﬁxation to the trauma” and “repetition-

compulsion,” terms that have made repeated appearances in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle. As to the negative aspect of trauma, nothing is to be repeated of the forgotten
traumata. Freud models the plot of the murder of Moses and the subsequent return of his
monotheistic demand on the positive aspect of trauma—the way of working through
trauma must be through acting it out. Trauma is about repetition, and so the murder of
Moses must be itself a repeated act of “the great deed and misdeed of primeval times”

( 1 13).
Deliberately leading his reader into the maze of a world where fantasy and reality get

blurred, Freud argues that the murder of Moses reenacts the fate of the primeval father, a
theory of the origins of human culture that Freud proposes in his own book Totem and
Taboo. Thus Freud points out:
The great deed and misdeed of primeval times, the murder of the
father, was brought home to the Jews, for fate decreed that they
should repeat it on the person of Moses, an eminent father
substitute. It was a case of acting instead of remembering,
something which often happens during analytic work with
neurotics. (113; italics added)
Just as the killing of the Father in the primitive time peculiarly initiates the ﬁrst
appearance of religion and moral obligations, a kind of spiritual sublimation in Jewish

Culture comes from the tragedy of the murder of Moses. According to Freud, it is the

\
UP, 1997).
37

man Moses, not God, who creates the character of the Jewish people by giving them a
religion which heightens their self-conﬁdence. Freud writes: “The people, happy in their
conviction of possessing truth, overcome by the consciousness of being the chosen, came
to value highly all intellectual and ethical achievements” (109). But this progress in
spirituality and intellectuality can happen only through a return of the repressed, a very
different kind of return from what we usually see in individual neurotics in whom the
return of the repressed produces a psychologically deleterious reaction. In the case of the
Mosaic religion, long after the trauma of the murder of the demanding father-ﬁgure,
monotheism ultimately proves victorious, and so it returns to contribute to the Jews’
“enhancement of their self-esteem owing to their consciousness of having been chosen”
and to reinforce the importance of an ethical life of truth and justice. Here, at the very
moment of the return of the repressed, “guilt became a spur to religious genius, to a
compulsion to attain to higher moral standards than any other ancient people” (Stern
48).25 Indeed, Yerushalmi has rightly observed that Lou Andreas-Salome was one of the
ﬁrst to have “intuitively grasped an essential aspect of Moses and Monotheism that has
largely escaped Freud’s commentators” (Yerushalmi 1991;78).26 After reading a summary
of Freud’s ideas on MM, Andreas-Salome responded in Freud’s favor:

What particularly fascinated me in your present view of things is a

speciﬁc characteristic of the “return of the repressed,” namely, the

way in which noble and precious elements return despite long

intermixture with every conceivable kind of material . . . . Hitherto

 

2’ David Stern, “The Ego and the Yid,” rev. of Freud ’3 Moses: Judaism Terminable and lnterminable by
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Freud and Moses: The Long Journey Home by Emanuel Rice, The New
Republic 207.13 (1992): 43-10.

2" Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud '3 Moses: Judaism Terminable and lnterminable (New Haven: Yale UP,
1991)

38

we have usually understood the term of “return of the repressed” in

the context of neurotic processes: all kinds of material which had

been wrongly repressed afﬂicted the neurotic mysteriously with

phantoms out of the past . . . which he felt bound to ward off. But

in this case we are presented with examples of the survival of the

most triumphant vital elements of the past as the truest possession

in the present, despite all the destructive elements and counter-

forces they have endured. (qtd. in Yerushalmi 1991;78)27
Andreas-Salome’s reading of the return of the repressed in the course of Jewish history is
strongly reminiscent of the image of a phoenix triumphantly soaring up out of the ashes.
Unlike an individual traumatic neurosis whose revisiting of the traumatic event does not
bring any sense of mastery, the traumatic genesis of Jewish history, though based on the
model of the neurosis, enables Jewish people to transcend the tragedy of the murder and
to return to the enduring legacy of Mosaic monotheism, a legacy of intellectuality,
spirituality, and ethical demands that Freud believed held the Jewish people together, and
enabled them to survive through centuries of persecution.

The Freudian project of repetition-compulsion also recalls the later judicial
murder of Christ that is itself a repetition of the murder of Moses. Indeed, Freud says,
when Paul interprets the death of Christ as the atonement for an original sin, he is
unconsciously remembering the murder of Moses, for how can a son of God allow
himself to be killed without guilt and thus take on himself the guilt of all men? It has to
be a son, since it has been the murder of a father. From this arises a complex connection

between Christianity and Christian anti-Semitism. Following Freud’s scheme of

 

27 lbid.

39

reasoning, Christians admit albeit in a distorted manner their sin against God by
accepting their “son-religion” and displaying a deep hostility against the Jews for they
“killed our God” (114). This is what appears to be the manifest source of Christian anti-
Semitism; what lies as latent motives against the Jews is the Oedipal rivalry. So Freud
ventures to assert, “[T]he jealousy which the Jews evoked in other peoples by
maintaining that they were the ﬁrst-bom, favourite child of God the Father has not yet
been overcome by those others, just as if the latter had given credence to the assumption”
(116). Locating the source of Christian anti-Semitism on an Oedipal rivalry, Freud is
holding an ethical appeal—the jealousy is ungrounded since the murder of both Moses
and Jesus is a repetition o f the trauma of the primal murder. Therefore, both the Jews
and Christians belong to the “brother horde.” For Freud is in effect telling the reader that
it was not God the Father who chose the Jews to be his people, but the man Moses, who
was not only a human being but also a non-Jew. Therefore, there is no reason for the
siblings to envy this child of Israel so murderously for his pre-eminent position. And so
it is possible to overcome the paranoid split between Jews and non-Jews, which
unleashes wave upon wave of persecution.

Working through the trauma of anti-Semitism by resorting to his own theory of
trauma model: “Early trauma—dcfence—latency—outbreak of the neurosis—partial
return of the repressed material” (105), Freud blurs the distinctions between fantasy and
reality, and in the end turns fanciful, if not literary, speculations into historical evidence
that supports his theory of the origin of religion. One gets the sense from Freud’s

reconstruction of Jewish history that the opposition between fantasy and reality is

40

irrelevant to his argument.28 Whether Freud’s constructions of Moses’s life story are
correct or not is precisely not the point, since the outcome of MM as a hybrid narrative,
partly historical and partly ﬁctional, carries a “trauma effect.” The text as a whole does
not claim that what it represents was real; rather, it creates a sense that what it represents
was real. It is not the dateable event itself, but the psychological reaction to an alleged
event that is crucial for Freud’s understanding of trauma. Indeed, Freud noted in 1934 in
the unpublished introduction to Moses and Monotheism that he meant to create a new
kind of writing that carries the outcome of the union of history and romance in which
events “derive their interest in fact from history, but their intent is that of the novel. They
want to sketch moving portrayals and to aﬁ’ect the emotions” (qtd. in Yerushalmi 379;
emphasis mine).29 Although Freud changed the book title from the (unpublished) original
one—The Man, Moses: A Historical Novel—to Moses and Monotheism, it is still the
emotional effect that runs strongly through the Moses study. In this respect, Richard J.
Bernstein also argues that it is more proﬁtable to read Moses and Monotheism from a
psychoanalytic perspective, because it is psychical reality that is decisive. In MM, the
“psychical reality does not presuppose the “actual” murder of Moses, although it
certainly does presuppose the factual reality of murderous feelings, emotions, and
intentions” (Bernstein 102).30 It is therefore the historical present of the Nazis’
murderous aggression against the Jewish people that prompts Freud to think up a

traumatic core in Jewish history. In this conjuring up a traumatic past for his “race,”

 

2’ Freud’s position in Moses and Monotheism reminds us of his thesis of the Wolfrnan case in which, even
after the Wolfrnan’s doubt on the actuality of the primal scene, Freud continues to see the primal scene,
even if imagined by the Wolfrnan, as the origin of neurosis. In imaging the origins of Mosaic monotheism
as well as in treating the Wolfrnan, Freud at once elides and displaces the opposition between reality and
fantasy in such a way that the status of the event as historical actuality cannot and need not be decided.
29 .

See Note 19.
3° Richard J. Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998).

41

Freud follows the peculiar traumatic time in which chronology gives way to a dynamic
but tragic sense of time—the present gets entangled with the past to such an extent that it
is no longer sensible to talk about time in trauma.

Seeking to deal with the traumatic present by an appeal to events which
presumably occurred in a shadowy historical past, Freud’s insistence on telling his own
version of a historical trauma with constant repetition of details has “the effect of
masking the violence that [he] faces in the present” (Kaplan 113; emphasis mine).31 Freud
masks a present trauma in three ways. First, he displaces the historical violence into the
protagonist Moses; second, he adopts an ahistorical paradigm of trauma to a historical
event, and third, the question Freud asks about the tragedy of Jewish history—“why do
they invite undying hatred of other people?”——avoids explaining the intensity of present
violence against Jewish people. And yet in the ﬁnal analysis, this masking strategy
signals an inability to move beyond the core of trauma—the murder of Moses. This
inability to move beyond a traumatic past paradoxically reﬂects the movement of
traumatic repetition, for while Freud pursues the murder of Moses relentlessly, the
murder also returns and haunts both Freud and the narrative itself. Imagined or real, the
repetition of the murder in the text speaks of a deadlock, a traumatic moment of
experience which cannot be superseded. The narrative can only enact and constantly re-
enact that traumatic moment as a point of ﬁxation; in this sense, the narrative functions as
a needle stuck in the groove, in an uncanny, obsessive compulsion to re-experience the
original traumatic event. Tramnatically repetitive, the narrative has a rhythmic temporal

stutter, suggesting an unresolved shock. This stuttering effect is also one of the

 

3' E. Ann Kaplan, “Trauma, Cinema, Witnessing: Freud’s Moses and Monotheism and Tracey Moffatt’s
Night Cries,” in Between the Psyche and the Social: Psychoanalytic Social Theory, eds. Kelly Oliver and
Steve Edwin (Lanham: Rowman & Littleﬁeld, 2002), 99-122.

42

distinctive traits that characterize Moses. At one time in Freud’s argument that Moses is
a noble Egyptian, Freud hints that Moses has a speech impediment. I would like to argue
that the uncanny stuttering betrays the characteristics of both Moses the person and the
text of Moses and Monotheism.
Stuttering into History: Textual 'It'aumatism

Arguing that the biblical narrative yields ample rooms for him to replace
historical fact with his own psychological speculations, Freud refers to those “striking
omissions, disturbing repetitions, palpable contradictions” in the Hebrew Bible as a
distortion of a text which is not unlike a murder (52). In this sense, the word “distortion”
has a double meaning: it “should mean not only to ‘change the appearance of,’ but also
‘to wrench apart,’ ‘to put in another place’” (52). One can argue that Freud’s criticism of
official history can be equally applied to the text of Moses and Monotheism. The text,
marked by contradictions, fragmentation, and adjunction, mirrors the subject matter
under discussion. Propelled by the forward drive of repetition, Moses and Monotheism
acts out repetition of historical violence while at the same time anticipating a trauma-to-
come. In other words, the text, like its subject, exists in a state of traumatism. And
nowhere is this textual traumatism more discemable than in the two prefatory notes to the
third essay (Part 111, Section I) and in a summary (which ﬁrnctions like a preface itself) to
Section II. The ﬁrst prefatory notes, written in Vrenna before March 193 8, is literally
“wrenched apart” from the second one, written in June 193 8, in London—again literally
“in another place.” In the various prefaces that he appends to his work, Freud himself
imposes a link between personal trauma—his aging body, his illness, his exile, and the

survival of psychoanalysis—and historical trauma by drawing our attention to the history

43

of the text’s own writing and publication.

Just as the Moses study contains the theory of individual trauma within the core of
the trauma of a larger history, the preface written in Vienna is a testimony to a kind of
double trauma: there it was the trauma of Freud’s personal crisis together with the trauma
of living in “very remarkable times” in which “progress has concluded an alliance with
barbarism” (66). Freud explains the reasons why he withholds the third essay from
publication: the weakening of his creative faculties and aging body accompanied by his
fear of inciting Catholic hostility against psychoanalysis. But it is in the second preface
written in London that arguably bears all the hallmarks of traumatic repetition. In the
face of catastrophe and horror, Freud seems to feel the importance of bearing witness to
his troubled times by recording the situation in which the third essay ﬁnally came to light.
The opening paragraph of the London preface touches on the too-sadly pertinent
phenomenon of a trauma-to-come that it is worth quoting in length:

The exceptionally great difﬁculties which have weighted on me
during the composition of this essay dealing with Moses—inner
misgivings as well as external hindrances—are the reason why this
third and ﬁnal part comes to have two different prefaces which
contradict—indeed, even cancel—each other. For in the short
interval between writing the two prefaces the outer conditions of
the author have radically changed. Formerly I lived under the
protection of the Catholic Church and feared that by publishing the
essay I should lose that protection and that the practitioners and

students of psychoanalysis in Austria would be forbidden their

44

work. Then, suddenly, the German invasion broke in on us and

Catholicism proved to be, as the Bible has it, but “a broken reed.”

In the certainty of persecution—now not only because of my work,

but also because of my “race ”—I left.

(69-70; emphasis added)
I want to argue that Freud’s exile forced by external political entanglement of his “race”
and their persecutors, rather than an escape from the condition of trauma, is its
dramatized literalization. And this forced exile echoes the exodus of Moses from Egypt
in that departure itself performs traumatic repetition. In this uncanny enactment of exile,
Freud stumbles on a historical trauma, compelled to tell once again a fragmentary and
stuttering trauma of history. In the “Summary” inserted in the middle of Part III, written
after Freud had moved to London, he retells the writing history of the book:

The following part of this essay cannot be sent forth into the world

without lengthy explanations and apologies. For it is no other than a

faithful, often literal repetition of the ﬁrst part . . . . Why have I not

avoided it? The answer to this question is easy for me to ﬁnd, but rather

hard to admit. I have not been able to efface the traces of the unusual way

in which this book came to be written.

In truth it has been written twice over. The ﬁrst time was

a few years ago in Vienna, where I did not believe in the possibility

of publishing it. I decided to put it away, but it haunted me like

an unlaid ghost, and I compromised by publishing two parts of the

book independently in the periodical Imago. They were the

45

psychoanalytical starting-points of the whole book . . . . The rest,

which might give offence and was dangerous of . . . . I kept back,

as I thought, for ever. Then in March 1938 came the unexpected

German invasion. It forced me to leave my home, but it also

freed me of the fear lest my publishing the book might cause

psychoanalysis to be forbidden in a country where its practice was

still allowed. No sooner had I arrived in England than I found the

temptation of making my withheld knowledge accessible to the

world irresistible, and so I started to rewrite the third part of my

essay, to follow the two already published . . . . a device which has

the disadvantage of extensive repetition. (131-32)32
This summary exists in fact as repetition and echo not only of the two prefaces in
question but of the narrative of Moses, in a series of recurrences at the same level of
intensity. This insistence on repeating yet again the history of how the book came to be
written, returning obsessively to the same themes, embodies the shape of a stuttering
trauma in which the story of trauma is never given as uninterrupted memory. Hence, the
random movement of Freud’s writing process interrupted by a tragic history resembles
the traumatic path of Moses’s monotheism. Both the text and the narrative stutter to
move beyond traumatic repetition but in vain. They are doomed to be haunted by the
repetitive return of the specters of trauma. The text echoing the movement of the
narrative is itself traumatized by an uncloseable ﬁssure between extemality and

intemality, and by its constant reminders of personal crisis and historical trauma in their

 

32 Cathy Caruth also quotes this passage in length in her Unclaimed Experience in which she reads the book
Moses and Monotheism itself as “the site of a trauma” that echoes “Moses’s murder, its effacement, and its
unconscious repetition” (20).

46

anxious repetition. In effect, it enacts a traumatic history which cannot be portrayed as a
sequence of events but in terms of isolated and repeated moments.

The repetition-compulsion to retell the violence of history produces a
discontinuous, traumatic narrative which is “anti-narrative, because it effectively blocks
all access to ﬁgurative contiguity or correlation, and therefore to any proper or
appropriate narrative or symbolic reassembly” (Wolfreys 140).33 The text of Moses and
Monotheism becomes the effective index of the presence of a historical trauma.

In sum, Moses and Monotheism presents a story of the twentieth century that
imprints the malady of historical trauma at the heart of the psychic experience. Above
all, it is Freud’s response to a “murderous hatred” of his people that is to come in World
War II that the past in Moses and Monotheism anticipates a traumatic future, and so
narrative chronology gives way to an anxious historicity. This anxious historicity is also
the thematic and structural concern of modernist writers. And it is in the sense that
Moses and Monotheism inscribes traumatic memory in its textuality that echoes
modernist writing in which time and consciousness, haunted by historical trauma, suffer a
kind of madness.

Trauma and Modernist Writing

Using Freud’s writing on trauma as a model that is the concern of Beyond and
MM, I turn in the following chapters to consider the relation between historical trauma
and modernist writing. In making a connection between Modernist narrative and
historical trauma, I want to focus on how modernist writers incorporate the depressing,

murderous form of traumatic repetition into their stories. Speciﬁcally, I want to argue

 

33 Julian Wolfreys, “Trauma, Testimony, Criticism: Witnessing, Memory and Responsibility” in Introducing
Criticism at the 21" Century, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2002), 126-150.

47

that a traumatic history cannot be disciplined, because by its nature it tells a story without
narrative plot, without beginning, end, or development, without a clear distinction of
roles. It challenges the meaningful continuity produced by emplotment. Narrativity is
met with suspicion because coherence and meaningfulness are alien to the lived
experience of a trauma. The past no longer exists but keeps haunting the present. In
modernist writing, narrative chronology gives way to an anxious historicity in which

traumatic memory keeps insisting on and manifesting its presence through repetition.

48

Chapter III. The Dynamic Principle of the Oxymoron in Women in Love

Written in an era of international slaughter and domestic turmoil, Women in Love
conveys more than a bitter feeling about the Great War; it presents the perversity of the
psyche taking pleasure in its own destruction. And we recall how Freud in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle is puzzled by the paradoxical nature of trauma in that the psyche is
taken aback by the horror of seeing itself enjoying its annihilation. While Freud tries to
“analyze” the entanglement of horror and pleasure in trauma, Lawrence “dramatizes”
such a pleasurable destructive form of existence in Women in Love. A purely violent
book, Women in Love explores obsessively the destruction of the world and psyche, their
disintegration and death. What we ﬁnd in Women in Love is an anxious impulse to see
everything through—destroying everything in order to feel alive—and without doubt,
such an overwhelming psychological trauma ﬁnds its objective correlative in the
overwhelming external event. Puzzled while at the same time fascinated by the question
why people could choose such a vast amount of destruction as it is evident in the Great
War, Lawrence registers the shock of radical historical change as an injury in the psyche.
Women in Love asks: Where the war is located? 13 it inside or outside; in the external
world or in the psyche? How to articulate this traumatic vision of the psyche that deﬁes
the life-giving Bros and destroys meaning? To “dramatize” such a lust for “inexpressible
destructiveness” that Gudrun detects in the miners of Beldover, a lust that also afflicts
everyone in the book, Lawrence employs the concept of the oxymoron in order to better
present the nature of trauma—the entanglement of horror and pleasure.

The spirit of the oxymoron pervades the art of Women in Love, and this fact has not,

of course, escaped his many critics. However, there has not been an attempt to link the

49

structure of oxymoron to psychodynamics of trauma. In this chapter, I want to stress that
the novel records trauma at its most basic lexical levels, through the very choice of words
by which the attempt at representation takes place. The following analysis seeks to
explore oxymoronic language as a key stylistic device of traumatic repetition. In the ﬁrst
section, I discuss how psychic trauma is textually inscribed in the novel’s inclination to
oxymoron in that words, sentences, paragraphs are presented in contending with
themselves; the second half of the section explores how this rhetorical oxymoron is used
to indicate the paradoxical world view presented in the novel. In other words, the
oxymoronic mode of language informs the content it deploys. That is, structurally
speaking, the relationship of Birkin and Ursula is also engaging in an eternal see-saw
struggle with that of Gudrun and Gerald. The last section focuses on the death drive that
so vividly and poignantly illustrates historical trauma.

1.

No ﬁgure of rhetoric captures the cruelty of war better than that of oxymoron.
Deﬁned by the juxtaposition of opposites or the coexistence of incompatibles, the
oxymoron hinges on a divided perception in which two elements are inextricably knotted
in a deadlock of opposition. Oxymoron as a compact paradox, a joining together of
contradictory words, produces an epigrammatic effect. Linguistically speaking,
oxymoron can be seen as words at war with themselves; as a ﬁgure of thought, oxymoron
is designed to surprise or jolt the reader into genuine reﬂection and insight, or endless
bafflement. In Women in Love, Lawrence largely uses the oxymoron to describe the
unreleased tension of war eroding the human relationship and psyche as experienced even

by people at the home front. Although by inclination Lawrence has already perceived

50

“the world as a vast system of interlocking polarities . . . . the war moved him further and
faster in this direction by imposing on the entire European consciousness just such a
system of binary opposition: for or against, friend or enemy, kill or be killed” (Delany
211).l Finding dualism a compelling system, Lawrence’s relationship to it is more
ambivalent and troubling. The madness of the Great War has convinced Lawrence that a
binary opposition which implies selection of one of the polarities and therefore exclusion
of inclusive options is too simple to depict a world caught in a deathly state. The
either/or approach cannot articulate a war-generated form of explosive consciousness in
which violence is the dominant activity of the psyche that is at war with itself. For
“either/or” Lawrence thus substitutes the ﬁgure of oxymoron as the working dynamics of
combining contradictories. The reader discovers quickly that the novel is based on a
profound intellectual response to the Great War and that the writer is almost obsessively
illustrating a world existing only in oxymoronic conﬂicts. Lawrence, however, is not so
much tracking the Opposed polarities of the oxymoron as he is fastidiously studying the
attempt by one thing to annul, replace, or eradicate, its opposites.2

One of the most disquieting qualities of Women in Love is its insistence on the
extinction of human beings, a lurking desire carried to such an extreme that almost every
character in the novel has at one time or another wished the whole human race
annihilated. A distinct example of this can be found at the very beginning of the novel
when Gudrun is asked by a certain miner’s wife about the price for her shocking

stockings, and she responds with a sudden violent and murderous anger: “She would like

 

' Paul Delany, D. H. Lawrence's Nightmare: The Writer and His Circle in the Years of the Great War ( New York: Basic
Books, 1978).

2 The tendency to erase or replace the opposing features of the other word in an oxymoron is well analyzed
by Marvin K. L. Ching. See his article "A Literary and Linguistic Analysis of Compact Verbal Paradox," in
Linguistic Perspectives on Literature, eds. Marvin K. L. Ching, Michael C. Haley, and Ronald F. Lunsford
(Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 175-181.

51

them all annihilated, cleared away, so that the world was left clear for her” (9).3 Such a

Lawrentian “genocidal rhetoric” (Delany 210) penetrates almost every aspect of the

”4 u

,9 ‘6

novel, and it is more disquieting that some key terms like “love, inhuman, pure,”
“single,” “ﬁnality,” and “fulﬁllment” carry a kind of apparent opposition in themselves
that they are engaging in an oxymoronic pull. Since the evolution of the above-
mentioned terms all points to the same direction—an instinctive pleasure of seeing the
world extinguished, an analysis of one term will be sufficient to show how words can be
charged with violence directed at themselves. In accordance with the “genocidal
rhetoric” of Women in Love, I will focus on the word “inhtunan.”

Not surprisingly, it is Gudrun, one of the characters who belongs to the category of
“death-seekers” in Leo Bersani’s terminology (Bersani 182),5 that ﬁrst uses the word
“inhuman” in her thinking of the world around her. Simultaneously attracted and
repulsed by the collier community in Beldover, Gudrun tries to reason why she should
feel such a nostalgia for the place in which one can feel “a foul kind of beauty,” and she
comes to this conclusion: “Now she realised that this was the world of powerful,
underworld men who spent most of their time in the darkness. In their voices she could
hear the voluptuous resonance of darkness, the strong, dangerous underworld, mindless,
inhuman” (117; my emphasis). At this point in the novel, the word “inhuman” has
already had a connotation of polarization in itself in that “inhuman” indicates a desirable

quality; the other negative as “inhuman” gives a sense of machinery callousness.

Signiﬁcantly, Gerald is the second character to be associated with the word

 

3 All quotations from Women in Love are from D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, Intro. Joyce Carol Oates
(New York: The Modern Library, 1993).

4 Fiona Becket has already made a wonderful study of how "love" functions as an oxymoron in Women in
Love. See Fiona Becket, D. H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet (London: MacMillan P, 1997).

5 Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1976).

52

“inhuman,” fatally in the Chapter “Water-Party” in which we see Gerald diving into the
lake but failing to ﬁnd the drowning Diana. When all his efforts to save his sister in the
water come to nothing, Gerald comes back to the boat, spirit shattered, and the narrator
describes him sitting “slack and motionless in the boat, his head blunt and blind like a
seal’s, his whole appearance inhuman, unknowing” (l 87;my emphasis). Here “inhuman”
indicates a negative meaning. Separated from the human world when he is in the water
by himself, Gerald suffers like an animal—he is not human as he is likened to a seal, a
horse. The inhumanness in him is even more poignantly felt in “The Industrial Magnet”
in which he imposes his chaotic will on transforming the miner into a “perfect, inhuman
machine” (236;my emphasis). The chapter of “The Industrial Magnet” acts out a chaotic
confusion not only in the mind of Gerald but also in his use of language. Thus, having
set himself to force “order” into the great industry, Gerald comes to “the conclusion that
the essential secret of life was harmony. He did not deﬁne to himself at all clearly what
harmony was” (235). In his confusing use of language, Gerald easily translates the word
“harmony” into the practical word “organization” which conveniently leads to the
inhuman productive machine. However, it is “this inhuman principle in the mechanism
he wanted to construct that inspired Gerald with an almost religious exaltation” (235;my
emphasis). Again, while the word “inhuman” in this chapter is meant largely to convey a
negative meaning, in Gerald’s eyes, “inhuman” is both attractive and repulsive.

It is not only those “death-seeking” characters, of whom Gudrun and Gerald are two
archetypal representatives, that are tied up with the word “inhuman.” Birkin and Ursula,

representatives of “life-seekers” (Bersani 182),6 use the word, too. We ﬁrst see Birkin

 

6 Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1976).

53

associated with the word “inhuman” again in the death-bound chapter “Water-Party”
when he tries to row the spirit-shattered Gerald home. The reluctant Gerald refuses to be
taken home, but “Birkin rowed evenly and unswerving, with an inhuman inevitability”
(188; my emphasis). Appearing in this ominous chapter, the word “inhuman” is
inevitably linked with death. That is why following the chapter of “Water-Party” Ursula
naturally reﬂects on the meaning of death in “Sunday Evening.” For Ursula, death is
othemess—“the pure inhuman” (199). As “[t]hat which the word ‘human’ stood for was
despicable and repugnant to her” (254), it follows that what the word “inhuman” stands
for must be desirable and appealing.

The association of the word “inhuman” with those “life-seeking” characters such as
Birkin and Ursula may offer an alternative to the use of “inhuman” by Gerald and
Gudrun. Yet, the “inhumanness” that both Birkin and Ursula wish for comes from a
profound grudge against the human being as the following two examples demonstrate:

1. [H]uman beings are boring, painting the universe with their own

image. The universe is non-human, thank God. (274)

2. Love is too human and little. I believe in something inhuman, of which
love is only a little part. I believe what we must fulﬁll comes out of the
unknown to us, and it is something inﬁnitely more than love. It isn’t so
merely human. (455; italics in original)

The speaker in both quotes is Ursula, but it sounds as if Birkin is doing the talking.
Ursula and Birkin’s wish for an ideal and mystical inhuman world is no less violent than
Gudrun and Gerald’s murderous instinct for wiping out the entire human race. The verbal

similarities, though hidden and subtle, between both the “death-seeking” and “life-

54

seeking” characters, force us to see the polarity in meanings for terms like “inhuman.”
That is, according to the logic of Women in Love, the same word can have almost
opposite meanings in different contexts. Thus, “inhuman” at one time is seen as horrible;
other times, simply loveable and desirable. In other words, the word “inhuman” entails a
number of oxymoronic conﬂicts within itself, so opposites may appear as exchangeable.
Or one wants to hint at the fact that even opposites are equal in many important points so
that “ultimately” they must be seen as altogether identical. Signiﬁcantly, Gerald’s
confusion of language brings home this dynamic principle of oxymoronic tension in
words: “I never know what those common words mean. All right and all wrong, don’t
they become synonymous, somewhere?” (455). \Vrthin this context, Diane S. Bond’s
study of language in Women in Love also strikes the same tone:

The established polarities or oppositions tend to collapse or dissolve when

we start looking at the language closely, so that what we actually have is a

series of meanings that shade into each other, a series with extremes or poles

that become associated with, if not transformed into, each other.

(Bond 81)7

II.

The oxymoronic energies in Women in Love are unmistakably evident in the interplay
between literal and ﬁgurative uses of phrases—the ﬁtting territory for oxymoron to
demonstrate its power. It is my contention that in this novel Lawrence’s unusual
fascination with the deep polar struggle between human relationships can be attributed to
the war trauma that deeply transforms the human psyche. The paradigm for this struggle

is the oxymoron of language itself, but the supreme battle is fought within the psyche. In

 

7 Diane S. Bonds, Language and the Self in D. H. Lawrence (Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1987).

55

the case of Women in Love, an oxymoronic duality is best to show the entanglement of a
traumatic psyche. The ﬁgure of traumatic entanglement has been fully discussed in
Chapter I of this dissertation, but Lawrence seems to push a traumatic encounter of the
oxymoronic opposition to a fatal entanglement where any two elements in this novel,
whenever they come into contact, engage in a battle of life and death. “But always it was
this eternal see-saw, one destroyed that the other might exist, one ratiﬁed because the
other was nulled” (462). This is how the narrator of Women in Love analyzes the
destructive relationship between Gerald and Gudrun. This terrible “eternal see-saw” can
be applied to the whole novel as well—to several key terms, sentences, paragraphs, and
by extension, to the content and structure of the novel. In bringing almost everything into
a situation where “a ﬁne passion of opposition” is aroused (128), Lawrence meant for the
novel to take “the bitterness of the war” for granted in the characters. This implication of
the inseparability of ultimate and antithetical dimensions and experiences of life under
the inﬂuence of war illustrates the paradox that life is death and death is life, that love is
hate and hate is love, and that desire kills. Thus the relationship between Birkin and
Gerald is described as being ﬂawed because a strange enmity that is very near to love
lurks underneath their friendship. As the narrator analyzes it, “[i]t was always the same
between them; always their talk brought them into a deadly nearness of contact, a strange,
perilous intimacy which was either hate or love, or both” (31). Similarly, though
Lawrence undoubtedly intends to render Birkin and Ursula’s love relationship as
desirable compared to other relationships in the novel, theirs does not appear on critical
examination to be an ideal one. At the initial stage of their search for ideal love, Ursula

frequently adopts the vocabulary of war to describe the on-going relationship. As her

56

rumination over their love shows, Ursula feels as if she had announced a declaration of
war on love and Birkin had accepted the challenge; therefore, their love is “a fight to the
death between them—or to new life: though in what the conﬂict lay, no one could say”
(146). Of course, Ursula and Birkin do seem to achieve a state of harmonious unity in
“Excurse”, but such a state is too momentous to disperse the shadowy tension that
continues through their relationship.

If Lawrence fails to bring a stable unity between Ursula and Birkin, he is more
certain when he dramatizes the destructive relationship between Gerald and Gudrun.
From the moment Gudrun sees Gerald, she is uncannily magnetized by something
northern about Gerald’s disposition that glistens “like sunshine reﬁ'act[ing] through
crystals of ice” (11;my emphasis). Composed of dualistic oppositions, Gerald’s life is
pulled by oxymoronic tensions. On one hand, he does violence to the world around him;
on the other, he takes pleasure in doing violence unto himself—a kind of perverse
pleasure in self-destruction. And this oxymoronic propensity in him is repetitively
illustrated in a series of scenes. For example, in the famous scene in which Gerald forces
a horse to stand ﬁrm by a railroad when a train goes by, Gerald is engaging in a war with
the horse: “Both man and horse were sweating with violence. Yet he seemed calm as a
ray of cold sunshine” (113; my emphasis). Again Gerald is described in a compelling
oxymoronic vision: cold sunshine. This epithet—“cold sunshine”—is of course a
canonic example of oxymoron, and it is only ﬁtting that Gerald is the one associated with
this kind of oxymoron most often in the novel as he is more direct and coarse compared
to Gudrun, who enjoys the subtlety of everything.

Hence, in the depiction of the subtle perverse psyche of Gudrun, Lawrence employs

57

more complex structures and involves various forms of syntactical expansion,
distributing the oxymoronic terms within different clauses of the sentence. The paradigm

3”

for such an example occurs again in the chapter of “Coal-Dust when Gudrun responds
to Gerald’s abuse of the horse with sensations of heat and cold—

Gudrun looked and saw the trickles of blood on the sides of the

mare, and she turned white. And then on the very wound the bright spurs

came down, pressing relentlessly. The world reeled and passed into

nothingness for Gudrun, she could not know any more. (113)
But Gudrun will not allow herself to be possessed with such a mindless heat for too long.
She soon recovers and is “quite hard and cold and indifferent” (113; my emphasis).
Strictly speaking, the description of Gudrun’s mysterious transports here may not be a
classic oxymoron per se, since it is discursively diluted, but Lawrence expands the
definition of oxymoron to include sentences and paragraphs to be his organized
oxymoronic aesthetics. One more example will suffice to show how Lawrence integrates
an expanded oxymoron, developed and sustained over the whole sentence, into the whole
paragraph,8 investing the sentence with the power of its tension and the depth of its
mystery:

Gudrun looked at Gerald with strange, darkened eyes, strained with

underworld knowledge, almost supplicating, like those of a creature

which is at his mercy, yet which is his ultimate victor. He did not

know what to say to her. He felt the mutual hellish recognition. And he felt

 

8 Among others, Gamini Salgado and Nicholas Crawford have also analyzed how Lawrence expands the
oxymoronic rhetoric phrases to include sentences and paragraphs. See Gamini Salgado, "Taking a Nail for
a Walk: On Reading Women in Love," in D. H. Lawrence, ed. Peter Widdowson (London: Longman, 1992),
137-45; and Nicholas Crawford, "Altar of Paradox: Women in Love and the Mystery of Dualism, " in Like a
Black and White Kaleidoscope Tossed at Random: Essays on D. H. Lawrence 's Women in Love, eds. Jean-
Paul Pichardie and Philippe Romanski (France: Universite de Rouen, 2001), 45-58.

58

he ought to say something, to cover it. He had the power of lightning in his

nerves, she seemed like a soft recipient of his magical, hideous white ﬁre.

He was unconfident, he had qualms of fear.

(250; emphases added)
This paragraph appears in the famous scene in the chapter of “Rabbit” in which Gudrun
and Gerald unconsciously form a sort of diabolic bond that is “ abhorrent to them both”
(250). The language in the above paragraph describing their demonic bond has the effect
of “radical indeterminacy” that hovers on the edge of oxymoron and thrusts beyond it
into unresolved tension (Salgado 138). At this point, both Gudrun and Gerald inﬂict their
destructive power on the rabbit whose vehement violence is only a projection of their
perverse mentality. In their struggle with the rabbit, they show the coexistence of two
contradictory elements in them; vehement coldness and killing heat blend into each other,
for it is difﬁcult to determine who really is wielding the power in the scene. That Gerald
personiﬁes the element of coldness is well established by the novel, but on close critical
examination, it is Gudrun’s “diabolic coldness,” so subtle and delicate, that corresponds
to the ominous, murderous air of the whole novel. Gerald’s coldness seems to freeze
everything he touches, but it is unto himself that his coldness demonstrates its powerful
destructiveness. Gudrun’s coldness is less obvious, and yet slowly and poignantly, it
kills. The war between Gudrun and Gerald that is fought unconsciously just beneath the
surface of civilized life in the earlier part of the novel ﬁnally breaks the surface and
becomes a heated conﬂict of life and death in the last three chapters in which their
entanglement is transformed into a cosmic level of struggle between heat and cold, in

horrifying intimations of some ultimate threat. And this ontological nature of their ﬁght

59

brings home the crucial and controlling metaphor of destruction in Women in Love—the
two-faced image of disintegration by heat, and annihilation by cold.
III.

The development of the novel into the snow-bound, drearn-like white Alpine world
in the end where the metaphor of “snow-abstract annihilation” becomes literalized seems
to fulﬁll “a mystery of ice-destructive knowledge” that Birkin ruminates for the path of
dissolution taken by the white races (263). In Birkin’s meditation on the Arctic process
into a universal dissolution, Gerald appears to be the chief representative of this northern
mode of disintegration—“one of [the] strange white wonderful demons from the north,
fulﬁlled in the destructive frost mystery” (262). Birkin can’t help but speculate on
Gerald’s fate, “And was he fated to pass away in this knowledge, this one process of
frost-knowledge, death by perfect cold? Was he a messenger, an omen of the universal
dissolution into whiteness and snow?” (263-64). But it is the other extreme form of
cultural dissolution—the African way of the “sun-destruction”—brought into full play at
the end of the novel and interlocked in strife with the Arctic way that makes Gerald’s,
and by extension, the culture’s, death by perfect cold a thrilling pleasure. The African
way plunges everything into the hell of sensationalism, having abandoned all effort at
“pure integral being” and turned to extreme reﬁnements of sensual knowledge, “mystic
knowledge in disintegration and dissolution” (263). Gudrun represents such a reﬁned
sensationalism.

The novel takes pains to build up a link between Gudrun and the African way of
ﬁnding a sensual, perverse thrill of destruction. In Birkin’s speculation on the cultural

pursuit of dissolution, it is the more exotic, African principle of sensual knowledge in

60

corruption that ﬁrst conjures up in his mind. Birkin recalls one primitive sculpture of a
woman in labor in Halliday’s rooms, a statue which he declares to be art because it
“contains the whole truth” of the state it expresses, the product of “pure culture in
sensation, culture in the physical consciousness, really ultimate physical consciousness,
mindless, utterly sensual” (78; Lawrence’s emphasis). He then recalls another statue of
female ﬁgure, West African, which is a symbol of sun-destruction knowledge, “the
putrescent mystery of sun-rays” (263). It should be noted that Gudrun’s fondness of
wearing ﬂamboyantly challenging and startling colors of socks and of primitive African
sculptures unmistakably though subtly ties her up with the exotic, African way of
dissolution. The novel dramatizes the heated physical pleasure of seeing the gradual
snow-dissolution by acting out of latent violence and interdestructivity in Gudrun’s
relationship with Gerald. In other words, disintegration by heat and annihilation by cold
are unconsciously bound with a dangerously oxymoronic destructiveness. This explains
why Gerald is simultaneously attracted and repelled by “absolute” sensation in the
Aﬁ'ican fetish. Fascinated by the “utter sensuality” of the fetish, its total surrender to
physical consciousness, Gerald knows that sensation is vitiated by conscious demonism.
And no sensation is so ﬁnal and satisﬁed than the extreme murderous sensation that
Gerald decides to feel when he sets his mind to kill Gundrun:
A sudden desire leapt in his heart, to kill her. He thought, what a perfect
voluptuous fulﬁlment it would be, to kill her. His mind was absent all the
evening, estranged by the snow and his passion. But he kept the idea
constant within him, what a perfect voluptuous consummation it would be to

strangle her, to strangle every spark of life out of her, till she lay completely

61

inert, soft, relaxed for ever, a soft heap lying dead between his hands, utterly

dead. Then he would have had her ﬁnally and forever; there would be such

a perfect voluptuous ﬁnality.

(478; emphases added)
The desire to murder described in an oxymoronic conglomeration of cold and heat (the
snow and the passion) is felt as a physical sensation of excitement. But Gerald ﬁnally
realizes that to complete “a perfect voluptuous ﬁnality,” the subject should maximize the
energy of physical sensation within itself. In other words, to taste the ultimate form of
sensual fulﬁllment, one should direct the desire for murder to oneself so that one ﬁnds
extreme satisfaction of the deep reactive sensation for destruction. That is'why Gerald
releases his hands on Gudrun’s neck with an attempt to strangle her but ﬁnally decides to
take a ﬁnal walk instead to his death in the “hollow basing of snow” (492), for in death
he can experience a blissful fantasy of regressive merging with the snow, like a child
returning to the womb.

That Gerald’s “death by perfect cold” is associated with a womblike return perfectly
symbolizes the dynamic function of heat and cold that both Gerald and Gudrun
experience for the desire to murder in the Alps setting. The effect of Gerald’s drifting
asleep in the cold snow feels more chilling with his willingness to take the process of
“purely sensual understanding” (263). Similarly, Gudrun’s cynical jokes and nihilistic
fancies for the destruction of the world, an instinctual destructive power ﬁnally lapsing
into a sheer and brutal unrestraint in the Alps setting, communicate a terrible sense of
perversely cold emotion and cruelty. As a chief embodiment of the hot African mode of

sun-ray destruction, Gudrun, ironically, feels thrilled and at home with the frozen snow

62

 

setting. The “center, the knot, the navel of the [snow] world” ﬁlls her with strange
rapture, Gudrun feeling “[a]t last she had arrived, she had reached her place. Here at last
she folded her venture and settled down like a crystal in the navel of snow” (416). For
Lawrence, this terrible waste of cold whiteness and silence signiﬁes the end of world, a
nightmare version of the Apocalypse shared by Ursula and Birkin. For Ursula, the
“bruisingly, frighteningly, unnaturally” frozen air seems “conscious, malevolent,
purposive in its intense murderous coldness” (423). This murderous coldness perfectly
matches Gudrun’s brutal, wounding sensation toward Gerald as she resolves to combat
him:
The deep resolve formed in her, to combat him. One of them must triumph
over the other. Which should it be? Her soul steeled itself with strength.
Almost she laughed within herself, at her conﬁdence. It woke a certain
keen, half contemptuous pity, tenderness for him: she was so ruthless.
(429; emphases added)
Again, oxymoronic polarities—as Gudrun’s cruel tenderness toward Gerald demonstrates
here——are introduced at every level of the deadly combat between them. Just as Gerald
takes his meandering long process of African way in order to fulﬁll his disintegration into
the snow, Gudrun, too, ﬁnds that the instinctual release of heated murderous sensation is
best enjoyed when ﬂavored with the ringing cold of snow. The snow is therefore the
ideal backdrop for the perverse thrill of killing. Unlike Gerald who ﬁnds consummation
of voluptuous ecstasy in killing himself, Gudrun takes delirium of pleasure in imagining
the destruction of the world, a mocking dream of destruction that invokes horror and

confusion when added by the mockery and nihilistic cynicism of Loerke, a fellow artist

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whom Gudrun meets in Tyro and whose degeneration poignantly represents, for Birkin,
the darkness of our evolutionary future. Gudrun and Loerke share the delight in mocking
imaginations of the end of the world: “Humanity invents a perfect explosive that blows
up the world, perhaps; or the climate shifts and the world goes cold and snow falls
everywhere and “only white creatures, polar-bears, white foxes, and men like awful white
snow-birds, persisted in ice cruelty” (471). The novel tells another story, however; the
perfect personiﬁcation of white creatures—Gerald—does not survive the catastrophe of
cold snow. What survives is the desire for chaos and confusion as the world gradually
slides into sheer perversity and meaningless brutality.

IV.

Why is African dissolution sometimes described as cold? And why is the Northern
process sometimes associated with mud and marsh ﬂowers? Why does the dissolution of
the Arctic north described as hot? Lawrence plays dangerously with polarized themes of
integration/disintegration and creation/destruction that they merge into an uneasy
conglomeration. And yet it is a feature of Women in Love that metaphorical tropes of life
and death, love and hate, victim and victimizer point to a peculiar logic that underpins it.
That is, the novel is ruled by oxymoronic entanglement that symbolizes not only the
psychodrama of the characters but also the upheaval of their historical period. “ﬁth a
picture of global chaos in mind, Lawrence depicts the madness of a collective trauma that
is explicit in the Great War. The ultimate form of trauma is the desire for chaos, a form
that ﬁnds its expression in the entanglement of victim and victimizer. Birkin best
explains this logic: “It takes two people to make a murderer: a murder and a murderee.

And a murderee is a man who is murderable. And a man who is murderable is a man

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who in a profound if hidden lust desires to be murdered” (31). Although Gerald voices
his strong disagreement to Birkin’s odd reasoning about the logic of murder, the novel
actually supports this logic.

Numerous examples in the novel illustrate the horror of entanglement of victim and
victimizer. The drowning of the entwined lovers in “Water Party” is merely the most
dramatic instance. The scene of Diana getting her arms tight round the neck of her ﬁance
who tries to save her from drowning causes a lot of confusion. Choking the young man
dead, Diana becomes a murderer and yet she is also a victim of disaster. The bodies of
the dead get so close that they become one in death. Similarly, in Gerald’s terrible will to
modernize the miner business, he acts like the god of death by substituting the
mechanical principle for the organic, killing the soul of the coal miners. The new world
may be strict, terrible, inhuman, and yet it is “satisfying in its very destructiveness,” the
narrator comments (129). The narrator goes on to analyze how it is possible for Gerald to
inﬂict such destructiveness upon the coal miners: “Their hearts died within them, but
their souls were satisﬁed. It was what they wanted. Otherwise Gerald could never have
done what he did. He was just ahead of them in giving them what they wanted” (23 8-
9;emphasis mine). One can hardly tell the difference between the victim and victimizer
in such a chaotic world; the Birkinian murder logic ﬁnds evidence in Gerald’s
entanglement with the coal miners.

But of course, the death struggle between Gerald and Gudrun perfectly effectuates
the poignant truth that it takes two to make a murderer. Knowing that courting Gudrun is
equivalent to courting death, Gerald nevertheless enjoys opening his wound to her

because in this disclosure he can keep his “cruellest joy” (463):

65

He would keep the unﬁnished bliss of his own yearning even though the

torture she inﬂicted upon him . . . since in being near her, even, he felt the

quickening, the going forth in him, the release, the knowledge of his own

limitation and the magic of the promise, as well as the mystery of his own

destruction and annihilation.

(463; my emphasis)
In a sense, Gudrun allows Gerald to satisfy his impulse to be murdered by helping put
him to sleep in the snow. The version of frantic entanglement of murder and murderee
informs the dynamics and structures of the novel. Both victim and victimizer are just two
sides of a coin; they are ultimately exchangeable and maybe even identical. Victims and
victimizers are often the same thing, just slightly different ways of indicating strong
interaction that is mixed up in oxymoronic fashion. In this, the blurred distinction
between victims and victimizers recalls Wilfred Owen’s poem “Strange Meeting” in
which the speaker dies and enters hell, only to ﬁnd himself face-to-face with the soldier
whom he killed the previous day. Owen reﬂects on the fraternity that exists between all
soldiers on the front line, so that a closer bond exists between those who fought on
opposite sides than exists between soldiers in the trenches and their compatriots who
have not experienced the front. The speaker is greeted in hell by his former enemy, who
suggests that they put aside their differences and rest together. Likewise, Lawrence’s
spirit of oxymoron illustrates a world of entwined opposites in which oxymoronic nature
of certain problems and situations mirrors the confusion of a traumatic psyche. This
traumatic oxymoron lies, more often than not, beneath the superstructure of language and

rhetoric. We must, therefore, look at the deep structure of Women in Love if we want to

66

see what oxymoron means for Lawrence and how it ﬁrnctions artistically.
V.

It remains to consider more closely the outcome of Lawrence’s oxymoronic rhetoric
in the overall context of Women in Love. “Entanglement,” “merging,” “mingling” or
other forms of breaking down the line of distinction are to be dreaded and at the same
time desired in the novel. So against the entanglement of victim and victimizer, the novel
offers a competing, alternative theory of “star-equilibrium” which, according to the
thought experiment of Birkin, means “a pure balance of two single beings. . .as the stars
balance each other” (151). “Star-equilibrium” is itself an oxymoron in structure, for it
“represents Birkin’s desire to be simultaneously single and exist meaningful in relation to
an other” (Becket 173; emphasis in the original).9 The theory of “Star-equilibrium” is the
only model which the text sets against dissolution and apocalypse; and it fails. It fails
mainly because it increasingly becomes empty talk of Birkin, especially when he cannot
even put his own theory into practice in his relationship with Ursula. The chapters in
which the lovers pursue a repeating pattern of quarrel and reconciliation—“An Island”,
“Mino”, “Water-Party”, “Moony”, “Excurse”——show Birkin repeatedly retreat from his
theoretic citadel and Ursula’s insistent intimacy wins temporary victories. Beneath all
professions of love and all allegiance to “higher” things lies the lust for cruelty—the vain
effort to ﬁnd fulﬁllment in destructive sex and violence.

If erotic love is not a solution to the crisis of the present moment, “what then, what
next?” (469). This is a question literally asked by Gudrun. The entire text is also

concerned with this question—it has the four main ﬁgures of Ursula and Gudrun, Gerald

and Birkin, openly debating where there is a choice between death and survival,

 

9 Fiona Becket, D. H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet (London: MacMillan, 1997).

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dissolution and creative growth. In the episode “Continental” Gudrun questions Ursula’s
plan to leave the murderously cold Tyro for the sunny Italy. For Gudrun, there is no
escape, and it is only an illusion to think one can get out of the dying old (454). The only
way to do with the world is to see it through. And when the death of Gerald brings
Ursula and Birkin back again to Tyro, Birkin ﬁnally realizes that the way out to Italy is
only a way in again (496). So the Birkin-Ursula relationship is brought into an
oxymoronic opposition to that of Gudrun and Gerald, and the text privileges neither. A
ﬁgure that brings together terms and ideas which bear opposing meanings, oxymoron
denies the characters any option of choice, because they themselves are the products of a
radical split. The tragic paradox is that there is no great unifying idea at the present
moment; there is simply aimless, futile activity. The narrative of Women in Love does not
merely deploy a series of oxymora and contradictions in the service of a larger unity. It is
centrally oxymoronic because it is shot through with the continuous felt tension between

the necessity of articulating a vision and its impossibility.

VI.

Referring to the drowning accident of Diana in the episode “Water-Party,” the
narrator records the local people’s response with a mingling of solemn grief and
excitement, “Did all enjoy it? Did all enjoy the thrill?” (195). Such a question implies the
disturbing but provocative message that the horror of death event is also and at the same
time that which offers pleasure, the very feeling that satisﬁes the psyche. Taking pleasure
in a supposedly unpleasurable event like death is a question that baffles Lawrence.

Women in Love records the mysterious lust for death, the luxuriant talk of corruption.

68

The desire for violence may well have seemed universal at a time when the whole of
society was bent on destruction. The novel bears the violent imprint of its historical
moment—the madness of a collective ego.

In one sense, Women in Love is a complex, intellectual meditation on the meaning of
the violent impulse to death, so the enjoyment of a death-drive becomes an issue for the
novel, overtly discussed, theorized, and dramatized. Death as a drive, a process, an
event, and a ﬁnality repeatedly remains the central concern for every character in the
novel. The characters’ compulsion to repeat a ﬁxation on a moment of brute and
irrecoverable 1033 reveals less a pleasure in violence done to “others” than it is a joy taken
in psychic self-destruction. The power of Women in Love, therefore, lies not in its
analysis of the pervasive violence and disintegration, but in its acute and troubled
perception of a turbulent consciousness that takes delight in self-destruction. Lawrence
maintained that the horrors of the war were self-inﬂicted—the question is why people
could choose such a vast amount of destruction? Such a pleasurable brutality is best
grasped through a recourse to Freud, since Freud is also at pains to link pleasure and
destructive repetition in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

“Repetition compulsion” is a phenomenon Freud used to describe the catastrophic
consequences of the war trauma. The mind seeks to feel pleasure and avoid pain, Freud
thought. Judging from the fact that the psyche’s aim is to seek pleasure, the act of
revisiting the painful past on the part of the war neurosis cannot possibly offer the psyche
any sense of pleasure. Repetition of the painful past is felt as a pleasure only when it is
accompanied with mastery of the past. However, repetitious dreams of trauma override

the pleasure principle and its free ﬂow of instinctual energy in their attempt to bind the

69

original traumatic stimuli. The adult traumatic experience reveals only a compulsion to
repeat the trauma with no pleasure of self-mastery. The trauma is not bound, but
uselessly and painfully re-experienced without modiﬁcation by consciousness. Why then
is so much energy devoted to so self-canceling an end? And why do men insist on their
destruction, wondered Freud? Could the secret lie in the unconscious where another
instinct is equally active as its counterpart life instinct? Eros (life instinct), which has
been the cornerstone of his psychoanalytic theory, cannot explain alone the tendency of
the war trauma patients to turn destructive violence inward. It is this suggestion of a
purely self-destructive instinct in the psyche which led Freud to speculate on the
existence of the death drive (Thanatos).

As a retort to Eros, Thanatos seems to be equally valid 3 statement of equal
psychoanalytic signiﬁcance. Conceptualized as an antithesis to Eros, the death drive
seeks to dissolve and destroy what Eros strives to bind and connect. That which seeks to
“dissolve life back into its “primaeval, inorganic state” is the deﬁnition of the death drive.
A3 Freud wrote to Albert Einstein in 1932, the death instinct is “at work in every living
creature and is striving to bring it to ruin and to reduce life to its original condition of
inanimate matter” (“Why War?” 357). Still committed to a vision of pleasure as the
psyche’s primary aim, Freud then said that since an absence of all tension in the psyche is
viewed to be the ultimate pleasure, the death drive is not really in opposition to the
pleasurable principle. However, this conception of the death drive as a backward
movement to a state of zero tension characteristic of the pleasurable principle begins to
reveal its inconsistencies. If the compulsion to repeat a pain is the sign of the psyche’s

most radically self-destructive tendencies, it cannot at the same time be pleasurable

70

without ruining the opposition between Bros and Thanatos. Freud’s solution to this
theoretical inconsistency is to argue that the death drive is actually in service of Eros.
But then we cannot help asking, if both Bros and Thanatos aim for the pleasurable
principle, why then do we need the death drive which turns, in Freud’s formulation, to be
doing the same job as the life drive?lo Thanatos has meaning only when it functions
differently from Eros. Acknowledging that the death drive has the power to subvert life
from within, to turn life against itself, and bring life back to chaos or nothingness, Freud,
however, is unwilling to locate the death drive “beyond” the pleasurable principle. The
initial movement of Beyond the Pleasurable Principle seeks ﬁrst to sever repetition
compulsion and pleasure only ends in locating the pleasure on the side of the psyche’s
own unpleasurable undoing. To the extent that the text fails to keep the psyche’s perverse
desire to repeat a painful experience apart from the pleasurable principle, F reud’s theory
of the death drive falls into an oxymoronic logic that paradoxically indicates a complete
theoretical collapse. In the following, I wish to look more into the unarticulated
implications of the death drive as an oxymoron.

Freud’s conception of the death drive is analogous to the structure of oxymoron in
that two opposites——the life and death drives—are brought into close proximity that they
become uncannily interchangeable, creating radical contradictions which underpin the
psyche. Structured as oxymoron, the death drive reveals something deeply anarchic in
the human psyche. Thanatos, the drive of destruction, Freud fears, is actually more active

than Eros. The mass trauma that bears witness to the violent destruction of the Great War

 

'0 This idea remained troublingly inconsistent if not contradictory; as Laplanche remarks: “From an
economic point of view the major contradiction consists in attributing to a single "drive" the tendency
towards the radical elimination of all tension, the supreme form of the pleasure principle, and the
masochistic search for unpleasure, which, in all logic, can only be interpreted as an increase of tension”
(108). See Jean Laplanche, Life and death in psychoanalysis, trans. with an introd. by Jeffrey Mehlman
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976).

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reveals to Freud the temporary victory of the death drive over life. Freud suspects that
the attraction of war borrows from the attraction of the death drive, and this may explain
why most patients of war trauma seek not a recovery but a revisiting of the past trauma
against their will. In this, repetition compulsion on the part of the traumatized
misleadingly affirms the psyche of the death drive as erotic. The traumatic submission to
an unpleasurable repetition portends the enjoyment of an eroticized death-drive. This
oxymoronic conception of death identiﬁes a longing for death as exciting and anticipated.
In short, we have an eroticized Thanatos. This is a world where Eros is tainted by the
destruction of Thanatos, and Thanatos is seen equally as desirable as Eros. The special
concern with the seductive power of the death drive tells an inherent nature of
contradictions in human psyche in that Eros and Thanatos, though supposedly in
perpetual antagonism, blend into each other to form an oxymoron—Thanatical Eros.
This was a bitter thought for any apostle of modern European civilization. And
indeed the Great War gave a new, darker inﬂection to Freud’s thinking, causing him to
pay greater attention to aggression and sadism, and to explore the death-drive as a basic
component of human instinctual life. The war was a tragedy of civilization, in Freud’s
view, but it at least shed new light on human psychology—in its more tragic aspects. The
war conﬁrmed Freud’s belief in the destructive effects of the human psyche, as it
conﬁrmed Lawrence’s. Like Freud, Lawrence identiﬁes the spirit of the war as the spirit
of the death, and so in Women in Love he is obsessed with the images and gestures that
insist on the annihilating, wayward, rebellious, demonic, and contumacious to such an
extent that the psyche can ﬁnd satisfaction only in death. The novel’s obsession with

death has invited much critical attention. For example, Gerald Doherty argues that the

72

presentation of death in Women in Love anticipates contemporary conceptions of death as
metonymic event: “death is a random occurrence, a meaningless act, an essential non-
sense” (Doherty 62).ll Applying Roman Jakobson’s binary system of rhetoric to study
the dynamics of death event in Women in Love, Doherty also conceives death as a
metaphorical process, a transcendental act where death, like the function of a metaphor,

' raises the corpse up and ﬁlls it “with fresh spiritual meanings” (Doherty 57). Doherty’s
rhetorical analysis of the novel’s approaches sheds new and interesting light on the
novel’s visions of death. However, Lawrence’s presentation of death in Women in Love
is more ambivalent and troubling than Doherty’s dualistic approaches (either death is a
metaphorical event or a metonymic one) to death would allow. Granted that death “is a
central motif in the novel: Lawrence presents fatal accidents, fratricide, suicide and
natural dea ” (Schulze 33),12 Lawrence’s treatment of death reveals the psyche’s
compulsive submission to unpleasurable tension which is also enjoyable and may be
considered as tantamount to sexual enjoyment itself. In other words, Women in Love
brings Thanatos and Eros so close to each other that death is taken as the only goal worth
pursuing, insisting on death and destruction as the basis of awareness and meaning. And
this is the kernel of the oxymoronic structure of the death drive. The unarticulated
implications of death drive as an oxymoron in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and
Lawrence’s treatment of death in Women in Love are what the following passages set out
to explore.

At the heart of the death drive is the enigmatic function of repetition compulsion, for

 

" Gerald Doherty, "Death and the Rhetoric of Representation in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love," Mosaic
27.1 (1994): 55-75

'2 Cornelia Schulze, "D. H. Lawrence's War Novel: Modes of Violence in Women in Love," in Like a Black
and White Kaleidoscope Tossed at Random: Essays on D. H. Lawrence ’s Women in Love, eds. Jean-Paul
Pichardie and Philippe Romanski (France: Universite de Rouen, 2001), 31-44.

73

if as Freud points out that the unconscious does not believe in its own death, traumatic
repetition seems to contradict this belief. The shocking and unexpected return of a
trauma repeatedly brings the psyche into an encounter with death, a death in which the
psyche poignantly feels the inability to put an end to the unwished-for repetition of a
painful situation. In Women in Love, Lawrence articulates this tragic vision of repetition
compulsion through the death-bound history of the Crich family. And nowhere is this
tragic vision more painfully and movingly articulated in Gerald’s reﬂection on the
meaning of the tragic accident of Diana’s drowning. After his failed effort to save his
sister, Gerald bitterly remarks to Birkin: “Once anything goes wrong, it can never be put
right again—not with us. I’ve noticed it all my life——you can’t put a thing right, once it
has gone wrong” (189). This view of “things gone wrong can never be put right” reveals
not only Gerald’s pessimistic life philosophy but also the horror of a trauma repeating
itself through the unknowing acts of the psyche. Responsible for the safety of the water
at the family party, Gerald links the drowning accident as tantamount to his own doing as
he tells his father: “Well, father, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m afraid it’s my fault. But it
can ’t be helped” (188; emphasis added). Unknowingly, Gerald tells the truth of his death
wish, for once again he has caused a death to the family. Immediately the tragedy of his
murder of his brother when Gerald was a child calls to mind. The confession that “it
can’t be helped” compellingly marks the crisis of Gerald’s traumatic psyche, for
repetition of the murderous impulse gives the impression of a demonic force, that which
Freud points out precisely as the death drive. As if possessed by a demon, Gerald
repeatedly acts on a death drive against his will. Or, it is equally valid to say he

unconsciously repeats a destructive force done to others. And it is this phenomenon of “it

74

can’t be helped” which deserves our attention.

Gerald’s seemingly repeating a killing act by chance resembles Tancred twice killing
Clorinda. And it is not by chance that in Beyond the Pleasurable Principle Freud cites
the case of Clorinda who was killed twice by her lover Tancred to illustrate the
phenomenon of a trauma repeating itself, in Cathy Caruth’s words, “exactly and
unremittingly, through the unknowing acts of the survivor and against his very will”
(Unclaimed Experience 2). Like Gerald who seems to be haunted by some destiny,
Tancred performs a demonic tendency to repeat a painful past. To the extend that it is his
beloved that Tancred has unconsciously killed twice, his actions betoken a Freudian
scandal of a sadistic pleasurable. On the other hand, in unknowingly allowing herself to
be banned twice Clorinda illustrates a pleasure of masochistic surrender to painful
situations. In short, following the “murder” logic dramatized in Women in Love, it takes
two to make a murder because both the murderer and the murderee ﬁnd a compulsive
enjoyment in the act of killing. Such an enjoyment is the vexatious pleasure of a
compulsively repeated embrace of psychic tension that tends ineluctably toward death.
Hence by killing once again a sibling, Gerald surrenders to a pleasure, a pleasure far from
being masterful residing instead in a desire to repeat an unpleaurable past in order to self-
explosively submit to it. And it is in this oxymoronic logic of a compulsively pleasurable
submission that Freud’s theory of the death drive and Gerald’s killing once again of a
sibling start to become clear.

The violent interruption of the drowning into the festive occasion triggers a series of
responses to the meaning of death. Meditating on the meaning of Diana’s death, Birkin

argues that Diana is better off in death: “She’ll be much more real. She’ll be positive in

75

 

death. In life she was a fretting, negated thing” (190). This philosophy of
Birkin—“Death is all right—nothing better” (190)—reasons that the function of death is
no different from that of life so that the psyche seems to embrace annihilation with
ecstasy. Women in Love is replete with such a desire to explore the confusion of the
blend of life and death. Earlier Birkin has also reﬂected on the omnipresence of violence
and destruction, using water imagery as metaphor: “We always consider the silver river
of life, rolling on and quickening all the world to a brightness, on and on to heaven,
ﬂowing into a bright eternal sea, a heaven of angels thronging. But the other is our real
reality—“ (176-7). And he goes on to explain to Ursula that the “dark river of
dissolution” is our real reality which “ends in universal nothing” (177). This
metaphysical reﬂection of “the ﬂowering mystery of the death-process” as a form of
redemption for our reality of the “dark river of dissolution” makes death more seductive
than life, for death, as Dollomore’s reading of Freud’s conceptualization on death drive
points out, “is not simply the termination of life but life’s driving force, its animating,
dynamic principle” (193;emphais added).13 This world view of death as “life’s driving
force” reveals a traumatic psyche in which all energy is spent on turning an awareness of
the destructive into something meaningful, to turn pessimistic knowledge to an
afﬁrmation.

Reﬂecting on the incident of the drowning, Ursula asks, “Was not the adventure of
death inﬁnitely preferable?” (198). Her reverie is the major direct response to the smash
and the drowning of “Water-Party”; with a gesture of welcoming death as an escape from
a life without any inner meaning, a gesture parallel to that of Birkin, Ursula joyfully

speculates:

 

‘3 Jonathan Dollimore, Death, Desire, and Loss in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998).

76

To die is also a joy, a joy of submitting to that which is greater than the
known, namely, the pure unknown. That is a joy. But to live mechanised
and cut off within the motion of the will, to live as an entity absolved from
the unknown, that is shameful and ignominious. There is no ignominy in
death . . . There was nothing to look for from life——it was the same in all
countries and all peoples. The only window was death. One could look out
on to the great dark sky of death with elation . . . and there was no escape,
save in death. (198)
This elated contemplation of death as a joyful window open to the greater unknown is
cited by Gerald Doherty as an example of death as a metaphoric transﬁguration. Ursula’s
metaphorization of death endows it with a “visionary potential” (Doherty 63). However,
lying behind such an up-beat vision of death as a vehicle of transformation is a deathward
wish that mistakes death as an agent of Eros. As Ursula’s death-thought process shows,
death is “a great consummation, a consummating experience” (196) that promises life’s
greatest pleasure, and so death is undoubtedly seen as equivalent to the excitement of
sexuality. To equate death with sex is of course a time-honored tradition, and Lawrence
is certainly aware and wary of such a cliche’. In Women in Love Eros is often inseparable
from Thanatos, the arch example of which takes place in the episode “Death and Love” in
which Gerald literally carries death into his sexual encounter with Gudrun. As a climax,
Gudrun receives the “terrible frictional violence of death . . . in an ecstasy of subjection,
in throes of acute, violent sensation” (358; emphasis added). However, Lawrence’s
reﬂections on the turbulent consciousness of a historical background does not allow him

to simply regard frantic and destructive sex as another version of death; rather, the

77

language describing Gudrun’s thought points to a sexual excitement of killing/death. The
novel enacts, in its language and themes, Lawrence’s vision of a historical trauma in
which death and love are linked intimately to become inseparable. In trauma, the impulse
to death proves to be as strong as that to life; more importantly, this rejection of life gives
the illusion of ecstatic thrill and of inﬁnite possible. And there is much pleasure in
dwelling in the inﬁnite possibility of death, a route taken by Gudrun.

Whereas Birkin and Ursula theorize about death, Gerald and Gudrun dramatize the
death drive. Gudrun’s complaint at the beginning of the novel that “Nothing
materializes!” (5; italics in original) is not an accurate statement, for the novel provides a
lot of occasions to get the attraction/fantasy of death materialized. In her life-and-death
struggle with Gerald, Gudrun is thrilled at the charm of death in which she ﬁnds the
notion of pure possibility: “that was the charm to her, the lovely, iridescent, indeﬁnite
charm,--pure illusion. All possibility—because death was inevitable, and nothing was
possible but dea ” (486; italics in original). This reﬂection on death not as an end itself
but instead offering all possibility echoes and the same time overrides Ursula’s notion of
death as a window to the joyful unknown. In the terms that I have deﬁned, both Gudrun
and Ursula’s conceptions of death are locked in an oxymoronic tension, repeating, with
variations, a single psychology that brings Bros and death into contiguous contact.
Gudrun’s death-exuberance marks less a sadist pleasure in destroying Gerald than a
masochistic surrender to the death drive, for in favoring Loerke she unconsciously
chooses a much slower tour to death, the long path of dissolution with Loerke, the
“wizard rat that swims ahead” (43 8). Indeed Gudrun’s masochistic submission to a slow

disintegration has its close counterpart in Mr. Crich’s death. To the extend that Gudrun

78

 

performs the compulsive pleasure of self-destruction, she transfonns the overly intended

6

message— ‘I take pleasure in seeing Gerald ecstatically dying”—into a more radically
true one—“I erotically seek my own death?” This riotous stirring in self-destruction
beneath the quasi-metaphysical meditation on death opening the door to all possibility
reveals the true radical message of the death drive—it is a pleasure of seeing oneself
dying. As Laplanche remarks, “the death drive is in the ﬁrst instance turned, not toward
the outside (as aggressivity), but toward the subject . . . . It is radically not a drive to
murder, but a drive to suicide, or to kill oneself’ (italic in original). In terms of acting on
a drive to suicide, Gerald makes a perfect partner of Gudrun.

Mth Gerald, however, we have an interesting but complex story that links life to the
destructive power of the death drive. Gerald asks, “If death isn’t the point . . . . what is?”
(210). For Gerald death is the point, and the text will take him there. Long before
Gerald’s actual death in the cold snow, Gerald has recognized that his real activity lies in
a “ghastly wrestling for death in his own soul” (335). Viewing the death struggle of his
father as an object of fantasy as well as horror, Gerald enacts a perverse will to
“experience the whole process of slow dea ” as if it was he himself dealing with the
death (335). Hence, he compulsively stays to the end to witness “the fearful space of
dea ” with a perverse desire that he “somehow wanted this death, even forced it” (335;

italics in original). Wanting death, Gerald takes a long detour before he reaches his ﬁnal

goal. His pursuit of death with excitement and awful exhilaration makes death-event

 

" I owe these two sentences to Gregory Forter who links reading of the American hardboiled detective
novel to an enjoyment of an eroticized death-drive. Arguing that Freud's Beyond the Pleasurable Principle
fails to separate enjoyment from compulsive repetition, Forter sees such a failure "threatens to transform its
intended message-"I seek (non-erotically) my own death"--into its more radically true one: "I like (take
pleasure in) somebody (myself) being dead (ecstatically dying)" (430). With due respect to F orter, I borrow
his idea and slightly change the order of two sentences to accord with argument that I make for Gudrun's
death wish. See Gregory Forter, "Criminal Pleasures, Pleasurable Crime," Style 29.3 (1995): 423-77.

79

interesting, and this curious inclination to make “ever more complicated detours before
reaching [his] aim of death” paradoxically presents us with “the picture of the phenomena
of life” (Beyond the Pleasurable Principle 46).” Gerald’s relationship to death
foregrounds the oxymoronic mode of endowing the death-process with erotic enjoyment.
When, in “Snowed Up”, Gerald anticipates killing Gudrun, he trembles “in his most
violent accesses of passionate approach to her, trembling with so much desire” (489;
emphasis added), linking murder and death with sexual desire. But the thrill of killing
others compares unfavorably to the pleasure of suicide—the true destination of death
drive. Releasing his hands on Gudnm’s throat, he confesses, “I didn’t want it, really,” a
confession recalling Kaiser’s statement of July 1915: “I didn’t want the war.”16 The end is
the desire that remains to Gerald, the end of his life. His suicidal walk to the snow
movingly illustrates a psychological trauma that seeks a thrilling joy of encountering
death. The detailed account of his death renders Gerald as object of fascination and
anguish. This persistent expression in the novel of death as sexual enjoyment reads as a
textual embedding of the perverse thrill of killing in a war. “Death and Love,” Bros and
Thanatos are mingled in an oxymoronic tension.

A novel on the pleasurable principle of death, Women in Love hovers on the
anxiously thrilling joy of self-destruction, and this joy of self-destruction extends to a
wish for the death of the entire human race. In Birkin’s diagnosis, “Humanity itself is
dry-rotten” so humanity must go, and “there would be no absolute loss, if every human
being perished to-morrow’” (129). And his picture of “a world of empty of people, just

uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up” convinces Ursula that it is indeed a clean,

 

'5 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasurable Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989).
’6 See Jack Stewart's notes for Women in Love in Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence (New York: The
Modern Library, 2002), 501-524.

80

lovely picture of a manless world (129-30). This demonic longing for radical eradication
of humankind gives the power of negation in Women in Love its full signiﬁcance. We
recall Ursula’s delirium of death opening a window onto a prospect of ultimate
puriﬁcation and renewal of the earth purged of human kind. This impulse to get the thing
with in order to feel alive gives rise to a chilling apocalypse. And the novel’s apocalyptic
tone reverberates with the sense of doom that points to the Great War fought outside of
the novel. Facing the radical absurdity of such senseless self-inﬂicted destruction,
Lawrence can propose the apocalypse as the only solution to the madness of the world.
All the fantasies of exterminatory rage entertained by virtually every character in the
novel reveals a collective trauma, for “apocalypse is trauma” (Berger 59).17 A
catastrophic and obliterating event, apocalypse generates symptoms that the violent social
upheaval sends tremors even into the cellars of the unconscious. But Lawrence’s vision
which offers the end of history as the only solution to the disorder of history is an
oxymoron, creating an unresolved tension. The novel ends in the midst of an argument
between Birkin and Ursula stands as powerful and poignant evidence of a schizophrenic
world still trapped in an ever-escalating circle of trauma and symptom.

VII.

As the underlying dynamic ﬁgure organizing Women in Love, oxymoron allows
Lawrence to dramatize the explosive nature of war trauma. The wartime atmosphere of
death-bound violence saturates the air of Women in Love so that the novel repeatedly
turns toward a catastrophe, incorporating a ghostly, haunting experience. Women in Love

deﬁnes a problem, “Supposing this old social state were broken and destroyed, then, out

 

’7 James Berger, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
1999).

81

of the chaos, what then?” (103), and seeks a solution but in vain. Gudrun and Gerald
propose to “dance while Rome burns, since it must burn,” for embracing chaos is such
“an orgiastic and satisfying event” (298). Hence, the novel remains on the side of
unbound, disturbing, freely ﬂoating energy of trauma without toying with the hope of
working through. The ultimate oxymoronic view of trauma is to transform it into erotic
fantasies where the two sets of life-and-death imagery merge, not in harmony, but in a
perverse contention that confuses the psyche, a psyche that ﬁnds oxymoronic pleasure in

traumatic repetition.

82

Chapter IV: “Remember My Party” through Trauma: the War and the Politics of

Memory in Mrs. Dalloway

No, no not that,--it’s bad to think of war,
When thoughts you’ve gagged all day come back to scare you;
And it’s been proved that soldiers don’t go mad '
Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts
That drive them out to jabber among the trees. —Siegfried Sassoon

Regarded by Roger Poole to be “the ﬁnest ‘war novel’ that World War I produced”
(79),1 Virginia Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway participates in the cultural debates of its time
concerning the powerful and destructive effects of war trauma on the mind, of the war
generation’s tragedy. The mass outbreak of mental disorder caused by the shattering
effects of the ﬁrst industrial warfare as well as inhumane trench conditions forced World
War I to become the ﬁrst war in history that had to deal with the problem of war trauma
victims. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were seen to suﬁ‘er what was then called
“shell-shock.”2 A term coined during the war, shell shock vividly captures the
catastrophic consequences of war trauma on the mind that rendered victims
psychologically unable to leave the war behind even when the war was declared over. If
it is difficult to process, mediate, or commemorate the stark reality of the ordeal

undergone by millions of soldiers returning from the trenches, it is even more so with war

traumatized soldiers who return with no physical scars. From its inception, the

 

' Roger Poole, “We All Put Up With You Virginia’: Irreceivable Wisdom about War,” in Virginia Woolf and
War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth, ed. Mark Hussey (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1991), 79-100.

2 Although the exact number of shell-shocked soldiers can never be known, the numbers are consistently
high. In his No Man ’s Land: Combat & Identity in World War 1 (London: Cambridge UP, 1979), Eric Leed
notes that “[f]rom 1916 to 1920 four percent of the 1,043,653 British casualties were psychiatric cases”
(185). According to Peter Leese, 200, 000 is probably a reliable number of troops suffering psychological
disorders in the British Army. See Peter Leese, Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of
the First World War: (New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2002), 10.

83

 

phenomenon of shell-shock, described by Freud as a “dark and dismal subject” (Beyond
15 ), has occasioned much confusion and misunderstanding during and after the war. In
much of the medical literature on war trauma, shell shock is infamously interpreted as
“an affliction of the will, a sign of moral cowardice and hereditary weakness” (Lerner and
Michale 19),3 an interpretation consistently attached to the traumatized soldiers in
interwar/postwar society and culture. As such, shell-shock becomes the enemy of settled
society, for it mirrors “a social disease and national degeneration” (Mosse 103).4 In his
research on war-time shock and trauma in France, Marc Roudebush points out that
encounters with shell-shocked soldiers instigate in physicians a spirit of “neurological
patriotism” by which a “battle against hysteria” is waged to protect the health and virility
of the entire French nation (255).5 The French version of “neurological patriotism” can be
equally applied to post-war British society, for it increasingly becomes a cultural anxiety
at mass mental breakdown when overwhelming numbers of traumatized soldiers have

difficulty readjusting to civilian life, which creates legal, medical and moral concerns.6

 

3 See Lerner and Micale, “Trauma, Psychiatry, and History: A Conceptual and Historiographical
Introduction,” in Ti'aumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Ti'auma in the Modern Age, 1870-1930, eds.
Paul Lerner and Mark S. Micale (London: Cambridge UP, 2001), 1-30.

4 George L. Mosses, “Shell-shock as a Social Disease,” Journal of Contemporary History 35.1 (2000): 101-
108.

5 See Marc Roudebush, “ A Battle of Nerves: Hysteria and Its Treatments in France During World War I,”
in Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and TI'auma in the Modern Age, 1870-1930, eds. Paul Lerner and
Mark S. Micale (London: Cambridge UP, 2001), 252-279. Although Marc Roudebush attempts to make a
distinction between English doctors and French doctors’ attitude toward shell-shocked soldiers in that
French doctors perceived the “high incidence of traumatic symptoms among soldiers as an epidemic and as
a genuine threat to the strength and morale of the army” (254), several studies on the phenomenon of shell-
shock in the British Army counter such a distinction. For example, see Peter Leese, Shell Shock: Ti'aumatic
Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World War; (New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2002), and
Elaine Showalter, The female malady : women, madness, and English culture, I 830-1980, (New York :
Pantheon, 1985).

6 Again Leed notes that a decade after the war, in 1932, a full thirty-six percent of the veterans receiving
disability pensions from the British government were listed as psychiatric casualties of the war (No Man’s
Land, 184). Gerard J. Degroot, in Blighty: British Society in the Era of the Great War, (New York:
Longman, 1996), estimates that in 1922, 65,000 shell-shock victims were receiving disability pensions and
9,000 were still hospitalized. The magnitude of the problem may be gauged from the fact that, as Ted
Bogacz points out, “ in March 1939 there were still some 120,000 English Great War veterans receiving

84

The ambivalence, antagonism and confusion surrounding the terrifying effects of war
trauma prompt the British Government to establish a committee to investigate the nature
and treatment of shell-shock in the Great War. The result of such an investigation—the
Report of the War Oﬁ’ice Committee of Enquiry into “Shell-Shock” issued in
1922—replicates in many ways the already established prejudices against shell-shock.
The Committee was established through the good intention of its Chair—Lord
Southborough—to invoke sympathy for shell-shocked soldiers:
The subject of shell-shock cannot be referred to with any pleasure. All
would desire to forget it . . . to bury our recollections of the horrible
disorder, and to keep on the surface nothing but the cherished memory of
those who were the victims of this malignity. But, my Lords, we cannot do
this, because a great number of cases of those who suffer from shell-shock
and its allied disorders are still upon our hands and they deserve our
sympathy and care.
(Address to the House of Lords on 28 April 1920; qtd. in Bogacz 227)
The existence of large numbers of war-trauma ex-servicemen should create a more
sympathetic public attitude toward their psychological struggle; yet, as Ted Bogacz has
noted, the Committee came to the “fuzzy conclusion that while military rules concerning
cowardice were justiﬁed, seeming cowardice may be beyond the individual’s control
[which] saw a blurred line between shellshock and cowardice” (220). During the war as
well as after the war, shell-shocked soldiers were viewed with profound ambivalence.

Jay Wmter has argued that shell-shock has gradually involved to represent the “central

 

pensions. . . from war-related “primary psychiatric disability’” (251). See Ted Bogacz, “War Neuroses and
Cultural Change in England, 1914-1922: The Work of the war Ofﬁce Committee of Enquiry into Shell
Shock,” Journal of Contemporary History 24 (1989):227-256.

85

facets of the war itself” when it moves from the medical to the metaphysical (7).7 In
other words, shell-shock has turned a psychological shock into a cultural shock in which
soldiers, civilians as well as the state were all involved in wrestling with the lingering
effects of the war-induced trauma, and so it is true that “in a host of ways Britain has
never recovered from the shock of the 1914-18 war” (Winter 10).8 Similarly, Leese also
argues that “[e]ven as the war ended shell shock was entering the culture and quickly
establish itself as a symbol of the war” (176).9 It is under this cultural shock that Mrs.
Dalloway presents a powerﬁrl expression of Septimus’s shattered mind caused by the
Great War.

Concerned with the lingering effects of traumatic history, the novel portrays a most
vivid and heartbreaking picture of how survivors of war trauma encounter an
unsympathetic and hostile civilian audience that refuses to bear witness to their painful
past. In postwar English society, both war veterans and civilians struggle to survive the
havoc of the Great War. Eager to get on with life as if the war had not been fought on the
Front, civilians employ a collective denial of traumatic experiences, refusing to deal with
the anguished memory of the War. War traumatized veterans, on the other hand, struggle
to recover from a psychic wound of World War I.

Traumatic events create horriﬁed and anguished experience so alienating that it is
impossible to narrativize it in an accessible way, all the more so when the difficulty of
expressing the events is enhanced by the political and societal denial surrounding them.

Although painful experiences and psychic defenses of trauma survivors can alienate the

 

7 See Jay Winter, “Shell-Shock and the Cultural History of the Great War,” Special Issue: Journal of
Contemporary History 35.1 (2000): 7-11.

3 Ibid.

9 Peter Leese, Shell Shock; Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World War (New York:
Palgrave MacMillian, 2002).

86

traumatized from the public, for healing to take place, societies must provide cultural
forms and occasions for survivors to tell their stories and to receive some social
acknowledgment if not acceptance (Vickroy 19).10 A lack of such public sympathy
exacerbates traumatic symptoms, a situation dramatized in Mrs. Dalloway. Postwar
mainstream English society does not provide an atmosphere conductive to recovery from
the horrors of war. Woolf’s Septimus illustrates the difficulty of gaining access to
traumatic history, indicating that trauma “simultaneously deﬁes and demands our
witness” (Caruth 5).ll Civilians’ denial of war trauma—an emotional
paralysis—surprisingly parallels the way trauma deprives the victims of feelings as
evident in Septimus’s repetitive worry that he cannot feel. In writing a narrative of
trauma where sympathetic witness is denied to war veterans, Woolf explores how trauma
shapes both national and individual psychic structures in postwar English society. In this
chapter I use categories of the Great War, memory, and trauma to read how Mrs.
Dalloway dramatizes the cultural failure to remember a traumatic history, a cultural
amnesia which supports the nation’s need for a normative society where all grieving
should be wiped out. Speciﬁcally, I ask: Where does this denial come from? How does
Mrs. Dalloway narrate this denial of traumatic knowledge? What are the ethical
implications of seeing and not seeing trauma? How much are people willing to be
unsettled by the anguished sight of trauma survivors? What happens when trauma spills
the container of denial?

I. The Binding of Traumatic Knowledge

Trauma, as Freud deﬁnes it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, occurs when the

 

'0 Laurie Vickroy, Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2002).
” Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: TI'auma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1996).

87

“protective shield” that the psyche sets up as self-defense fails to ward off destructive and
powerful excitations coming from outside (6).12 Trauma is thus seen as an external event
that “is bound to provoke a disturbance on a large scale in the functioning of the
organism’s energy and to set in motion every possible defense measure” (20).13 One such
defense measure the psyche takes to master overwhelming ﬂood of dangerous emotions
is binding them so that they can be collected and managed. Binding is therefore “the
most important function of the psychical apparatus,” which “serves to protect the
organism against the unpleasurable unbinding of the ego caused by excessive stimulation,
or trauma” (Leys 29).” For Freud, trauma, as Mikko Tuhkanen has insightfully observed,
“is another name for unbinding: it is an experience in which stimuli break through
protective barriers in a way that the organism cannot effectively integrate into the
coherence of the whole” (566; emphasis mine)” The function of binding puts emphasis
upon the power of the organism to counter the threat perceived by unbridled emotion; it
also functions “as a way to avoid unpleasure by mastering energy so that it does not
inundate the organism, which guarantees its pleasure by binding excess stimuli into
manageable quantities” (Tuhkanen 558).16

Given the preceding discussion of the psyche’s attempt to master destructive external
stimuli, I wish to elaborate on the link between the binding ﬁmction as a normalcy testing

and the domestication of war trauma in Mrs. Dalloway by reading the latter as the

 

'2 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. & ed. James Strachey (New York: Liveright P,
1950).
‘3 Ibid.
'4 Ruth Leys, “Traumatic Cures: Shell Shock, Janet, and the Question of Memory,” in Tense Past: Cultural
Essays in Trauma and Memory, eds. Paul Antze & Michael Larnbek (New York: Routledge, 1996), 103-
150.
’5 Mikko Tuhkanen, “Binding the Self: Baldwin, Freud, and the Narrative of Subjectivity,” GLQ: A Journal
10! Lesbian and Gay Studies 7.4 (2001), 553-591.

Ibid.

88

nation’s effort at establishing a stable society. Post-war English society in Mrs. Dalloway
functions like the psychic displacement of traumatic events from consciousness, and it
surprisingly uses the same strategy—binding—to defend the nation against the upsurge
of large quantities of traumatic emotions that manifest in Septimus who carries his
trauma home. As a haunting and unwelcome remainder/reminder of traumatic history,
Septimus is a seething cauldron of emotions constantly threatening to overﬂow civilian
insensitivity to war trauma. Coming home with a psychic war wound, Septimus meets
with an unsympathetic civilian audience that is more interested in, as Leed points out,
conducting “business as usual” after the armistice and the treaty have been signed and the
war is designated as “over” (209). To do 30, civilians as well as the state have to set up a
“protective shield” against Septimus’s shell-shocked consciousness, so powerful and
dangerous that it will surely disrupt and tear up the illusion of “normalcy” civilians insist
on. While wandering as civilians do on a ﬁne day in London in June in 1923, Septimus is
culturally and politically bound by a web of denials. Binding can take many forms;
within the narrative of Mrs. Dalloway, denial of war trauma, shared ritual objects, and
medicalising the visions of trauma victims all play the role of binding experience. The
following discussion will focus on how civilians in complicity with the state attempt to
bind the transmission of traumatic knowledge.

While Septimus is immersed in his shell-shocked consciousness—the war becomes
his only reality ﬁve years after the war is over—civilians suffer “trauma-blindness” as
they compulsively try to deny the lingering effects of war. A good example of civilians
“quarantining” the horrifying consequences of the war occurs in the ﬁrst few pages of the

novel when Clarissa enjoys wandering in London, celebrating the fact of life returning to

89

the pleasurable everyday rhythms before the war. What she loves—“life; London; this
moment of June” (5)——appears enjoyable only when the consciousness is in denial of the
War:

The War was over, except for some one like Mrs. F oxcroft at the Embassy

last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the

old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a

bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed;

but it was over; thank Heaven—over:

(MD 5; emphasis mine)
The easy assumption that the war is a thing of the past and need no longer be a subject of
concern is also voiced in Richard Dalloway’s thought: “Really it was a miracle thinking
of the war, and thousands of poor chaps, with all their lives before them, shoveled
together, already half forgotten; it was a miracle” (MD 174). The above two passages
constitute simultaneously civilians’ anxiety over the effects of the war and their repetitive
insistence on its termination. While acknowledging that “[t]his late age of the world’s
experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears” (MD 13; emphasis
mine), Clarissa immediately stops her consciousness from thinking ﬁrrther and promotes
instead “courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing” (13). And Lady
Bexborough who continues to open the bazaar while receiving the news of the death of
her favorite child is cited for her exemplary stoicism in face of all “tears and sorrows”
(13). The worship of the stoical ideal is engaged in a conspiracy to deny the pain caused
by the war, a denial that amounts to the level of numbing effect seen in psychoanalysis as

a defense against the breakthrough of traumatic emotions. Thus, it serves the function of

90

warding off the memory of trauma and the meaning of the experience, putting particular
emphasis on survival and endurance. To believe that the war was over, one has to ignore
the presence of those still suffering at home through bereavement or physical and/or
mental injury. In the course of the novel, the phrase ‘the war is over’ comes to
summarize postwar British society’s deadening insensitivity to war veterans’ psychic
wounds.

Insensitivity to war trauma is also acted out in a tension between seeing (as a
physical perception) and not seeing (a ﬁgure of knowing). Those who physically see
Septimus fail to see through his psychic wound still fresh and bleeding ﬁve years after
the Great War. The inevitable movement from literal sight to ﬁgurative understanding is
evident in Mr. Brewer’s postwar consciousness. As Septimus’s prewar employer and
surrogate father, Mr. Brewer dismisses “the War” with only a “tut-tut” (MD 28). \Vrth
such a consciousness fundamentally in denial of the scope of injuries inﬂicted by the war,
Mr. Brewer, although proud to have Septimus return, can only praise his brave ﬁghting in
the War—“You have done your duty” (MD 108)—while ignoring the traumatic symptoms
Septimus begins to show ﬁve years after the War. Amiable as Mr. Brewer is to Septimus,
Septimus cannot help seeing the truth that Mr. Brewer belongs to one of the war deniers:

For the truth is . . . that human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor
charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment. They
hunt in packs. Their packs scour the desert and vanish screaming into the
wildemess. There was Brewer at the office, with his waxed moustache . . .
and pleasurable emotions—all coldness and clamminess within.

(MD 135; emphasis mine)

91

Communities, held together by the insistence on the present moment of pleasure, are on
the side of binding. The work of binding inevitably leads not only to the survival of the
group but to a coldness to those outside the bound entity. The sorrowful past is an
obstacle to the future, so it is better to forget about it and leave it behind. This oversight
of the past indicates a death of historical perception.

This oversight of a painful past reﬂects a general inattention to historical context,
most evident in Peter Walsh’s thinking pattern. Understood by Karen L. Levenback to be
a ﬁgure who “shares war-blindness” with other civilians, Peter Walsh sees Septimus but
does not really see (53). When Peter sees Rezia and Septimus in Regent’s Park, he
romanticizes their apprehensive look as a young couple passionately in love: “And that is
being young” (MD 106). He cannot think of the war as a cause of the couple’s distress;
in fact, he would rather turn his look to the more soothing sight:

The amusing thing about coming back to England, after ﬁve years, was the
way it made, anyhow the ﬁrst days, things stand out as if one had never
seen them before . . . . Never had be seen London look so enchanting—the
softness of the distances; the richness; the greenness; the civilization, after
India, he thought, strolling across the grass.
(MD 107; emphasis mine)
Although aware that “[t]hose ﬁve years—1918 to l923—had been, he suspected,
somehow very important: People looked different” (MD 108), Peter, rather than
suspecting that changes in London might have been caused by the war, looks forward to
the ﬁrture as he wonders: “What did the young people think about?” (108). In fact,

during his whole day’s fantasy “neither the war nor the war dead enter his consciousness”

92

(Levenback 50).17 And for Septimus who “sees” implications, not really seeing through
things equates with the death of soul; what he really sees in Peter is ironically true—“the
dead man in the grey suit” (MD 106). Peter’s identiﬁcation with the inscription around
the base of a statue he sees in London—“duty, gratitude, ﬁdelity, love of Englan ” (MD
76)——recalls “a great deal of the public-spirited, British empire, tariff-reform, governing-
class spirit” (MD 116) that has grown in Clarissa. Their ideal is identical to the national
ideal; the nation reﬂects and supports the “spirit” of normative society. So in many ways,
the death of soul is applicable to the state’s inability to cope with the massive surge of
war traumatized veterans.

Even Rezia, the only person who shares Septimus’s suffering, fails to see the
implications of his mental distress. Having never seen the horror of war, Rezia is unable
to cope with Septimus when ﬁve years after their marriage he begins to show traumatic
symptoms and a fanatical need to communicate, “Rezia could not understand him” (MD
139). On their way to the doctor, Rezia constantly fears that “people must notice”
Septimus’s strange behavior of talking to himself. People must see and she could not
bear it, so she leaves him alone on a bench in Regent’s Park, thinking only her own
suffering: “Far rather would she that he were dead! She could not sit beside him when he
stared so and did not see her and made everything terrible” (MD 33; emphasis mine).
Rezia’s wish that Septimus be dead rather than returning alive with strange symptoms
reﬂects a common attitude toward the war dead; that is, those who had died are seen as
morally superior. As Alex King points out, “the moral example of the dead provided an

elevated public image of the virtues of military service and of those who performed it”

 

'7 Karen L. Levenback, Virginia Woolf and the Great War (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1999).

93

(227).18 By contrast, those who return with shattered nerves bear signs of moral
weakness. It is Leed (2000) who argues that “[t]he postwar idealization of the dead is the
source of the myth of a ‘lost’ generation, the counter-Darwinian belief that those fallen in
war were morally superior to the survivors, who were lessened by their war experience”
(93).19 That she is herself a foreigner and suffers the same fate of isolation (a solitary fate
she associates with her being in love) as her husband does not make Rezia more receptive
and sympathetic to victims of war, which reveals the difficulty a traumatic survivor needs
to overcome in order to survive postwar society. The Regent’s Park scene in which Rezia
repeatedly and urgently implores Septimus to “look” poignantly points to a war of vision
between traumatic soldiers and civilians. That is, Septimus, being a sad, disturbing
presence, must be made to look outside of himself so that he can be easily assimilated
into the harmony that society demands. But Septimus dares “not look,” for looking
makes him see the war dead coming back to him: “Evans was behind the railings!” (MD
36). When Rezia beseeches him to look, he sees himself transformed to be “the
scapegoat, the eternal sufferer” (MD 37), a fate society has written for him against his
own will.

It is not just civilians who are eager to erase the sight of traumatized people. The
state in complicity with civilian deniers of war trauma plays an invisible all-seeing role in
repressing a traumatic chapter of its history. The power of the state’s surveillance over

her subjects is embodied in two of her duty-bound doctors: Holmes and Bradshaw. As

 

'8 Commemorating the war dead was regarded as a sacred act, so King observes, “commemoration
expressed the ﬁrndamental assumption that the dead should be respected and that what they had done in the
war should be valued. It attributed a number of virtues to them in order to justify holding them in honor”
(173). See his Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance
(Oxford: Berg, 1998).

'9 Eric Leed, “F ateful Memories: Industrialized War and Traumatic Neuroses,” Journal of Contemporary
History 35.1 (2000): 85-106.

94

Lerner and Micale point out, “Medical professionals had long thought of themselves as
state representatives whose task it was to inculcate the ideals of patriotism, service, and
self-sacriﬁce” (21).20 Recognizing that his traumatic symptoms deteriorate in his postwar
setting and wanting desperately to get over them, Septimus does call out for help: “Now
he had surrendered; now other people must help him. People must be sent for. He gave
in” (MD 136). Such a heart-breaking cry for help is met only with the brutality of his
doctors. As Herman explains, “In settings hostile to the concept of human suffering, the
medical profession is often not exempt from the culturally imposed silencing of traumatic
experience” (12).21 Read in the context of the tremendous numbers of shell-shocked
soldiers returning home to haunt the postwar world, Dr. Holmes’s hopelessly
imperceptive diagnosis of Septimus as just “headaches, sleeplessness, fears,
dreams—nerve symptoms and nothing more, he said” (MD 138) participates in the
governing class’s effort to ignore the aftermath of total war. Not only does he serve to
mobilize cultural desire to purge the evil of traumatic inﬂuence, he also puts the blame on
the victim. He tells Septimus that “health is largely a matter in our own control. Throw
yourself into outside interests; take up some hobby” (138; emphasis mine), a prescription
that is fundamentally in conjunction with the long-held prejudice against shell-shock; that
is, shell-shock sufferers are egotists and selﬁsh, and so they lack social responsibility.
The blame on the victim also calls the ﬁnal report of the ‘Shell-Shock’ Committee into
mind. Bogacz writes, “frustrated by the slipperiness and ambiguity of the disease,

witnesses and committee members blamed the victims rather than the atrocious

 

2° See Lerner and Micale, “Trauma, Psychiatry, and History: A Conceptual and Historiographical
Introduction,” in Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 18 70-1930, eds.
Paul Lerner and Mark S. Micale (London: Cambridge UP, 2001), 1-30.

2’ Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

95

conditions of the Western Front” (241).22

In Mrs. Dalloway’s postwar world that would feign ignorance of the War, no civilian
really sees the problem of Septimus; no one, that is, except the nerve specialist Sir
\Vrlliam Bradshaw from whom Rezia seeks help. Septimus’s ﬁrst meeting with Sir
Mlliam Bradshaw is situated in a narrative irony of what is really being seen. Bradshaw,
claiming to understand the human soul, “could see the ﬁrst moment [Septimus and Rezia]
came into the room; he was certain directly he saw the man; it was a case of extreme
gravity. It was a case of complete breakdown” (MD 144; emphasis mine). While his
diagnosis is right, Bradshaw refuses to see that Septimus’s mind bears the marks of the
historical twisting and writhing of the Great War. Instead, he brushes aside Septimus’s
need to communicate his psychic pain, and like Holmes, blames the patient for his
egotistic tendencies: “Try to think as little about yourself as possible” (MD 149). The
authoritarian control of the state over her subjects is manifested in Bradshaw’s health

6

prescription— ‘divine proportion” made possible by “Conversion” (MD 150). The
novel’s image of the demon-like goddess Conversion “who loves blood better than brick,
and feats most subtly on the human will” personiﬁes all the social forces that violently

impose order and conformity on individuals, especially “on the will of the weakly” (MD

 

22 See Ted Bogacz, “War Neuroses and Cultural Change in England, 1914-1922: The Work of the War
Office Committee of Enquiry into Shell Shock,” Journal of Contemporary History 24 (1989):227-256.
Several authors have pointed out the affinity between Woolf’s treatment of shell-shock in Mrs. Dalloway
and the War Committee’s report. For example, in “Virginia Woolf’s Septimus Smith and Contemporary
Perceptions of Shell Shock,” English Language Notes 25.2 (1987): 49-57, Sue Thomas notes, “Woolf‘s
development and treatment of Septimus Smith may . . . be read as a topical reﬂection of her angry response
to the Report of the War Oﬁice Committee of Enquiry into “Shell-shock, " presented to British Parliament in
August 1922, and to the publicity given the Report in The Times in August and September, 1922” (49).
Likewise, Peter Leese in his Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World
War (New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2002) observes, “Woolf’s portrait of shell shock shows close
attention to the public debates of the early 19203. The author very likely knew of the Report of the War
Oﬁice Committee of Enquiry into “Shell Shock", which was presented to Parliament and discussed widely
tin the press in August 1922, shortly before she conceived the character of Smith in October 1922” (166).
See also Peter Knox-Shaw, “The Otherness of Septimus Warren Smith,” The Durham University Journal
47.1 (1995):99-110.

96

152). Enhanced by his “divine proportion” and militaristic “Conversion,” Bradshaw not
only “prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade
childbirth, penalized despair, made it impossible for the unﬁt to propagate their views
until they, too, shared his sense of proportion” (MD 150; my emphasis). Aligning himself
with “the police and the good of society,” Bradshaw takes upon himself the job of
protecting the health and virility of all of England. His defense of England resembles
those French psychiatrist-patriots who wage a battle against hysteria. As the whole
culture is mobilized to rebuild a stable, uniﬁed image of nation and empire, weaklings
like Septimus are not ﬁt to be about and so should be put to “rest in solitude” so that it is
impossible for them to propagate their disproportionate view (MD 150).

In the hands of Bradshaw, Septimus’s maddest fears of being seen as a criminal are
validated. As a social disease Septimus must be “quarantined” from the public lest they
should be contaminated by his “unsocial impulses” (MD 154). Such a medical practice in
conjunction with a panoptic system of government control has the force to translate war
trauma as a sign of moral weakness. Here we can see that the metaphor of “conversion”
corresponds to the effects of binding chaotic energy so that it does not inundate the
organism. In Mrs. Dalloway, the two famous scenes—the backﬁring car and the airplane
sky-writing—also operate on the binding effect. Those two scenes serve to create a
symbol of communion that binds all Londoners together as they collectively focus their
sight on what Allyson Booth calls “ritual objects” (187).23 However, these two “objects-
as-emblems” violently draw the attention of a series of passers-by, commanding the

respect of the state. The violent explosion of the car, which Clarissa Dalloway mistakes

 

23 Allyson Booth, Postcards ﬁ'om the Trenches: Negotiating the Space Between Modernism and the First
World War (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996).

97

to be “a pistol shot in the street outside!” (MD 19), literally shocks Septimus back to the
experience of shelling. Signiﬁcantly, we ﬁrst see Septimus in the act of seeing. While
everyone including Septimus looks at the motor car with greatness seated within, they see
differently. Civilians paying their tribute to the greatness of England by looking at the
motor car are thrilled at the thought of being looked back at by the Royalty, “the Queen
bowing; the Prince saluting; at the thought of the heavenly life divinely bestowed upon
Kings” (MD 27). This reciprocal gaze is not shared by Septimus, who is terriﬁed with
“this gradual drawing together of everything to one center before his eyes” (MD 21).
Instead of seeing a center drawing people together, Septimus sees a world waving and
quivering and threatening to burst into ﬂames (MD 21). His vision of reality is so
terrifying that it is impossible to communicate it to civilians even with their willingness
to listen, let alone their reluctance to see the truth. The motor car symbolizing the
dignitary of the state generates in the gathering crowds an admiration for the “dead,” the
“ﬂag,” and the “Empire” (MD 25). Septrnus’s torment, the inner drama of a shell-
shocked victim, is played out in the midst of a society eager to indulge a unifying
emotion. Even in the midst of his hallucinations characteristic of traumatic symptoms,
Septimus surprisingly retains a keen awareness of postwar society’s desire for stability.
He sees himself as an obstacle to a uniﬁed fellow-feeling: “It is I who am blocking the
way, he thought” (MD 21).

The sky-writing airplane which takes the place of the car also serves to foster a
communion feeling at the expense of the shell-shocked soldier. The airplane writing
words in the sky to advertise a commercial product signiﬁcantly creates a common bond

between people when it draws their sight to all look up into the sky trying to decipher the

98

smoke words. Directing their gaze at the sky brings a sense of “extraordinary silence and
peace” to the civilian characters (MD 30); again this harmony, however momentary it
may be, is achieved when society turns a blind eye to the suffering of war veterans.
Septimus looks at the sky-writing airplane; what he sees only accelerates his internal
conﬂicts. Amidst the “silence and peace” shared by all civilians, Septimus desperately
tries not to go mad: “But he would not go mad. He would shut his eyes; he would see no
more” (MD 32; emphasis mine). Postwar British society is eager to forget about the War,
and so veterans like Septimus who suffer war trauma stand little chance of being regarded
as worthy of sympathy. In other words, social unity works against the sorrow of war
trauma which brings discontinuity and chaos in its wake.

The previous discussions focus on how postwar English society adopts different
strategies to bind traumatic knowledge. I would like to point out that Clarissa’s party
serves the interest of the state in its attempt at ritual puriﬁcation of the evil of trauma.
The care with which she prepares for her party gives a sense of ritualized oneness, and so
the party functions like the two ritual objects—the motor car with greatness seated within
and the skywriting airplane. Clarissa’s fondness of giving parties is criticized by both
Peter Walsh and her husband as an indulgence in triviality; yet Clarissa defends her
parties as an expression of her ideal of unity, the wish to bring together “so-and-so in
South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair” (MD
184-5). Critics have often stressed that the images of merging in Mrs. Dalloway

culminates in Clarissa’s party, which is a mingling of different people.24 For all its

 

2’ For example, Jean 0. Love, in her Worlds in Consciousness: Mythopoetic Thought in the Novels of
Virginia Woolf (Berkeley: U of California P, 1970), writes that the party is “a grand spiritual reunion” (147),
creating a feeling of integration. See also Nancy Topping Bazin’s discussion of how the party creates a
mystic sense of oneness, especially pp. 104-5, in her Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision (New

99

esthetic satisfaction in treating the party as a work of art, Clarissa integrates people as
much as she excludes them. At one time in the novel she associates her party with those
parties in Buckingham Palace, blazing among candelabras, glittering stars: “And Clarissa,
too, gave a party” (MD 25). This association puts Clarissa’s party in the service of the
state in that it attempts to ward off the more devastating facts and deep scars of the war.
On the narrative level, Septimus’s death makes it possible for the party to go on. The
news of Septimus’s death temporarily shatters Clarissa’s composure, but she quickly
recovers from the shock, invoking Lady Bexborough’s uprightness in the face of her
son’s death. In a world that penalizes despair and idealizes Lady Bexborough’s stoic
bearing, Clariss’s attitude toward the death of a shell-shocked soldier can be read as a
sign of repression, which is the only self-defense feeling that the state approves.

The social heroism of Lady Bexborough’s swilled determination to maintain
civilized values in the face of death and suffering amounts to the effect of numbing when
society is brought to face the death of Septimus. Throughout the novel, Septimus has
been troubled by the feeling that he corrunitted a crime against humanity—the crime of
not feeling. But it is the society that does not feel for him. The narrative irony is
palpable: “Human nature, in short, was on him—the repulsive brute, with the blood-red
nostrils . . . . Once you stumble, Septimus wrote on the back of a postcard, human nature
is on you” (MD 139). Recognizing himself to be “quite alone, condemned, deserted, as
those who are about to die are alone” (MD 140), Septimus sees “death” as the only
escape from an unreceptive audience who prefers to see him out of sight. In fact, his
awareness of being deserted brings a moment of clarity to him: “The whole world was

clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes” (140).

 

Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1973).

100

During Septimus’s dying scene, he has no consistent or responsive witness.

In fact, the only response Septimus meets is the society’s ﬁnal attempt to enclose him
from being seen: people either look away or misinterpret his death. Not wanting to see
the dying Septimus, “Mrs. Filmer ﬂapped her apron and made her hide her eyes in the
bedroom,” while Dr. Holmes simply “could not conceive” why the devil Septimus
commits suicide (MD 227). Peter sees the ambulance bearing Septimus’s body and
ironically praises it as “triumphs of civilization”: “It struck him coming back from the
East—the efficiency, the organization, the communal spirit of London” (MD 229;
emphasis mine). Indeed, Peter’s jovial dismissal of this horrifying event precisely
represents the communal spirit of civilians who are unable to bear emotional witness to
trauma. Septimus’s last words before suicide, “I’ll give it you!” speaks to a social,
collective vision which will deﬁne his disordered state as “cowardice” and “lack of
proportion”: “The coward!’ cried Dr. Holmes” (MD 226). This judgment on Septimus’s
death points to the long-standing image of shell-shock as a symbol of cowardice.

Most troubling is Clarissa’s indirect witness to Septimus’s death. It is a
commonplace of criticism of the novel that Septimus enacts Clarissa’s death wish. As
numerous critics have argued, his supposedly mad maunderings are her unspoken fears
and fragmented memory traces. For example, Phyllis Rose writes:

Septimus acts out instincts suppressed in Mrs. Dalloway, withdrawing to
live in a self-enclosed dream-world which frequently becomes a nightmare,
and ﬁnally opting for death, while she continues to push herself to connect

with people and to respond to the beautiful of the world outside her.

101

(135.6)25
Similarly, Makiko Minow-Pinkney also sees Septimus as a surrogate for Clarissa,
committing suicide on her behalf (77).26 Indeed, affinities, echoes, and chains of imagery
throughout the text do seem to link Clarissa with Septimus. I want to argue, however,
that despite this textual mode of communalization, Clarissa’s interpretation of Septimus’
death is just another subtle version of political coercion that imposes order and unity at
the cost of the war veteran’s rupture.

Although she undergoes a complex series of responses to the veteran’s suicide,
Clarissa’s ﬁrst reaction to the news of Septimus’ death is annoyance: “What business had
the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party? A young man had killed himself” (MD 280).
Then she tries to imagine herself physically experiencing the death: “There he lay with a
thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it” (MD
280; emphasis mine). But she does not see it; instead her interpretation of Septimus’s
suicide—“Death was deﬁance. Death was an attempt to communicate”—violates
Septimus’ uncommunicative thoughts that he does not actually want to die. In fact,
toward the end of the novel, Septimus is on his way of self-healing; when he calls out for
the dead Evans for the last time, signiﬁcantly Evans does not appear, which is a
promising sign of recovery that makes him feel “Life was good. The sun hot” (MD 226).
Completely alienated from witnessing Septimus’s internal eruptions, Clarissa can afford
to ﬁnd the thought of death consoling—“If it were now to die, ‘twere now to be most
happy” (MD 281)——because she does not have to be pushed to commit suicide like

Septimus despite her lingering ﬂirtation with death all day long. Septimus does not die

 

25 Phyllis Rose, Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf (London: Pandora, 1986).
2‘ Makiko Minow-Pinkney, Virginia Woolf & the Problem of the Subject (Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester,

1987).

102

“holding his treasure,” as she romantically imagines. Clarissa’s “visionary alienation”
(Guth 35)27 from war trauma allows her to identify Septimus’ tragedy as “her
disaster—her disgrace” (MD 282), thus positing herself as sympathetic mourner for
Septimus. As Guth further explains, “Clarissa’s interpretation should thus not be
attributed to visionary insight or pretematural communication but to her own desire to see
Septimus’ death in [her own] terms” (Guth 37; emphasis mine). The way Septimus
“vigorously, violently” ﬂings himself to death marks the point at which Clairssa’s
identiﬁcation with the shell-shocked soldier has to halt (MD 225). Her exultance in
Septimus’s courage to kill himself links her with the same inadvertent joy Peter feels at
seeing the efficiency of the ambulance passing by carrying Septimus’ dying body. Most
signiﬁcant is her joy that Septimus’ death “made her feel the beauty; made her feel the
frm” (MD 284) so that she has strength now to go back to her party. The strength Clarissa
gains from the dead Septimus echoes what I. Hillis Miller’s interpretation of this novel as
“a resurrection from the dead” (201)”; that is, Septimus’s plunge into death enables
Clarissa’s resurrection from the dead. And yet the resurrection scene also disturbingly
recalls the vampiric image of Bradshaw’s goddess Conversion, “who feasts on the wills
of the weakly” (MD 154 ), for Clarissa’s claim that Septimus’s deﬁant death acts as a
boost to her own life transforms her from a sympathizer to a vampire-like life-sucker.

The political hostess’ moments of rapture derive from her historical evasion of the impact
of the war. Thus, she can slips back into delusion while the shell shock of World War I
haunts the fringes. Clarissa’s post-trauma testimony to the death of Septimus offers at

best a troubled testimony to his oppression, but what is so disturbing is that her seemingly

 

27 Deborah Guth, “Rituals of Self-Deception: Clarissa Dalloway’s Final Moment of Vision,” Twentieth
Century Literature 36 (1990): 35-42.
28 J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982).

103

more sympathetic reading turns out to be another subtle and disguised version of violence
against shell-shocked victims.

Throughout Mrs. Dalloway, the reader confronts a world desperately trying to hold
onto an order long lost by looking away from the lingering horrors of the War. This
quest for wholeness and unity produces a tension between the felt responsibility of
remembering the war and the longing to forget it. And yet despite the culture’s violent
suppression of traumatic knowledge, it fails to “domesticate” traumatic symptoms. In
what follows, through the frame of psychoanalytic theorization of memory, I want to
examine the hard work of remembering traumatic history.

11. The Politics of Memory

Septimus shows symptoms of nervous breakdown at a time when “forgetting occurs
collectively from the way the experience of the war was consciously forgotten in 1919
and throughout the 19203” (Leed 89).29 The political climate of the 19203 prefers to
memorize the dead, for it allows the state to attribute the virtues of military service and
spiritual strength to the dead. It is worth pointing out that erection of war memorials,
the ceremonial gathering, and burial of the dead provide a palatable form of presenting
suffering in a manner comforting to the living. Alex King’s study of the politics of
remembrance in Britain shows that when the psychological health of all who had fought
in the trenches was publicly questioned, “the moral example of the dead provided an
elevated public image of the virtues of military service and of those who performed it”
(King 227).30 The state has everything in stake in conducting public commemoration of

the war dead in which the state can reaffirm its political ideas about the war; at the same

 

29 See Eric Leed, “Fateﬁrl Memories,” note 18.
3° Alex King, Memorials of the Great War in Britain: the Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance (Oxford:
Berg, 1998).

104

time, a remembrance ceremony brings “a coming-together of the community to express
sorrow and respect” (King 27).31 Memorial practices cover over the trauma by
reinstating what we call social reality, the comforting collective fantasy that provides
answer where there are none In short, it proves relatively easy to memorize the war
dead who symbolize a nationalist rhetoric of “love, duty, self sacriﬁce” (MD 152). By
contrast, the psychological plight of shell-shocked soldiers challenges a stable, uniﬁed
image of nation and empire. The story of Septimus points to the difficulty of expressing
the suffering of war trauma amid a culture that determines to forget about the war.
Although the psychiatric establishment as well as the mainstream British society fail to
provide an atmosphere conducive to recovery from the horrors of war, the huge numbers
of death by the war make it more difficult to remember the legacy of shell shock.
According to Bogacz, almost every British family has someone die because of the war.
Hence Bogacz observes: “In light of such sacriﬁces, it was difficult for many
Englishmen both during the war and for years afterward to forgive those who had
faltered in their duty or who had actually deserted their posts; “shell-shock” seemed an
all too easy way out for the weakling or the cowar ” (244).32

The story of Septimus is inescapably bound to a story of double telling; it dramatizes,
in Caruth’s words, “the oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of
life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the
unbearable nature of its survival” (Unclaimed 7).33 The paradoxical nature of his story is

more telling when he is able to survive war but is driven to death in peacetime. In death

 

3| -
Ibid.

32 Ted Bogacz, “War Neuroses and Cultural Change in England, 1914-1922: The Work of the War Office

Committee of Enquiry into Shell Shock,” Journal of Contemporary History 24 (1989):227-256.

33 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Tiauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,

1996)

105

as in life, Septimus is violently silenced by postwar English society, because his death
and mangled body will give rise to memories of the insensible war. And yet despite the
culture’s effort to “quarantine” war trauma, Mrs. Dalloway proves unable to quite erase
the trace of trauma. Septimus’ traumatic experience, inassirnilable into the narrative
present of the novel, keeps returning to haunt, to disrupt the narrative ordering. The
traumatized body of Septimus, to quote Caruth again, appears as “a symptom of history”
(Trauma 5). Caruth notes ‘the traumatized carry an impossible history within them, or
they become themselves the symptom of a history they cannot entirely possess” (Trauma
5).“ Traumatic survivors are a symbol of how histories are violently made and unmade in
a struggle to forget the trauma of the past.

For history to recover from trauma, society should provide means for the traumatized
to integrate their shattered shards of disrupted memory. In other words, society should be
willing to bear witness to trauma. However, as numerous psychologists have pointed out,
bearing witness to trauma is no easy job, for “the mere existence of victims provides
compelling evidence of tragedy and malevolence, and this results in considerable
discomfort for nonvictims” (Janoff-Bulman 149).35 Traumatic victims shatter our basic
beliefs that this world is safe and human beings are strong enough to ward off horrifying
events. In his account of the relationship between language and World War I that is
relevant to the discussion here, Paul Fussel observes:

One of the cruxes of war . . . is the collision between events and the
language available—or thought appropriate—to describe them. . . .

Logically, there is no reason why the English language could not perfectly

3" Cathy Caruth, ed. Tiauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1995).
35 Roonie Janoff-Bulman, Shattered Assumptions: Towards a New Psychology of Trauma (New York: Free
Press, 1992).

106

 

well render the actuality of . . . warfare. . . . What listener wants to be torn

and shaken when he doesn’t have to be? We have made unspeakable mean

indescribable: it really means nasty. (169)36
The nastiness of war trauma makes every civilian in Mrs. Dalloway turn a deaf ear to
Septimus whenever he tries to communicate, for Septimus, “Communication is health;
communication is happiness” (MD 141). Throughout the narrative, whenever Septimus
appears, he is trying to communicate: with Rezia, with the Prime Minister, and with the
world. His plea for communication highlights the dependency of the traumatized self on
others and helps to explain why it is so difficult for survivors to recover when others are
unwilling to listen to what they endure. Dori Laub has explained why the journey of
bearing witness is fraught with dangers: “The survival experience . . . is a very condensed
version of most of what life is all about: it contains a great many existential questions,
that we manage to avoid in our daily living, often through preoccupation with trivia”
(72).37 Complicating the issue of bearing witness to trauma are Septimus’s own failures
of recall and acting out his trauma in disturbing ways that alienate him from the outside
world.

Woolf’s use of dual narrative juxtaposing the story of Septimus and Clarissa in a
single day has often been said to show their interrelatedness, connecting, if only
momentarily, “what would otherwise remain disconnected” (Squier 120).38 The story of
Septimus presents, however, an order of reality fundamentally differently from

Clarrissa’s vision of the world. Septimus’s disturbing visions of the past do not ﬁt in the

 

36 7Paul Fussell, The Great War and modern memory (New York: Oxford UP, 1975).
7Dori Laub, M. D., “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” rn Testimony. Crises of Witnessing
in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, by Shoshana F elman and Dori Laub, M. D. (New York:
Routledge, 1992), 57-74.
8Susan Merrill Squier, Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City (Chapel Hill: U of N
Carolina P, 1985).

107

“connecting device” that critics would like to see in Woolf s narrative technique. Rather
Septimus’s memory of his traumatic past repetitively intrudes on the “tunneling process”
commonly shared by Clarissa and her sets.39 Echoing Woolf’s delight in her discovery of
the “tunneling process,” J. Hillis Miller points out that “Mrs. Dalloway is a brilliant
exploration of the functioning of memory as a form of repetition” (Miller 177).40
However, Miller fails to see the difference between Clarissa’s narrative memory and
Septimus’s traumatic memory. These two terms come from Pierre Janet’s observation on
trauma victims. Distinguishing between two kinds of memory--“traumatic memory,”
which merely and unconsciously repeats the past, and “narrative memory,” which
narrates the past as past, Janet writes:
Memory, like belief, like all psychological phenomena, is an action;
essentially, it is the action of telling a story. Almost always we are
concerned here with a linguistic operation . . . . The teller must not only
know how to [narrate the event], but must also know how to associate the
happening with the other events of his life, how to put it in its place in that
life-history which each of us is perpetually building up and which for each
of us is an essential element of his personality.
(qtd. in Leys 124; italics in the original)"1
In an attempt to investigate how individuals remember things, Paul Connerton comes to

the same conclusion that remembering involves telling a story as a sequential: “To

*

39 On October 15, 1923, Woolf wrote about her discovery of the “tunneling process”: “It took me a year’s
groping to discover what I call my tunneling process, by which I tell the past by installments, as I have
need of it. This is my prime discover so far” (272). See Virginia Woolf, A Writer '3 Diary: being extracts
fmm the diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1953).

40 J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982).

4' Ruth Leys, “Traumatic Cures: Shell Shock, Janet, and the Question of Memory, ” in Tense Past: Cultural
Essays in ﬁauma and Memory, eds. Paul Antze & Michael Larnbek (New York: Routledge, 1996), 103-

1 5 O .

108

 

remember, then, is precisely not to recall events as isolated; it is to become capable of
forming meaningful narrative sequences” (26).42 In contrast, tramnatic experience
disrupts narrative because trauma is neither remembered nor experienced as sequential.
Thus Janet adds, “one who retains a ﬁxed idea of a happening cannot be said to have a
‘memory’ of the happening. It is only for convenience that we speak of is as “traumatic
memory’” (qtd. in Leys 125). Elaborating on Janet’s theory of memory, van der Kolk
and van der Hart write: “Narrative memory consists of mental constructs which people
use to make sense out of experience” (427).43 Therefore, when Clarissa remembers the
most important episode in her past—her rejection of Peter Walsh, she is trying to make
sense of her choice to marry Richard Dalloway. In contrast to narrative memory, trauma
victims become attached to the trauma; they are “unable to make sense out of the source
of their terror, [so] they develop difficulties in assimilating subsequent experiences as
well” (van der Kolk and van der Hart 432). Unlike Clarissa, whose memory entails a
social act, Septimus is no longer able to resuscitate his past from the “tunneling process.”
He is out of touch with his former self; his youthful passions for Shakespeare, for
England, for Miss Isabel Pole are now utterly alien to him. Traumatized by his war
experience, Septimus enacts disturbing traumatic memory where he is completely
engulfed in his distorted and disjunctive sense of time, living in the perpetual past with
the present and future almost nonexistent.

Despite the ﬂuid boundaries between past and present in Mrs. Dalloway (Miller

184), non-victirns of trauma have no difficulty telling apart the past from the present. For

example, when Clarissa remembers “the central episode of [a] common past” in Bourton

 

‘2 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989).
’3 B. A. van der Kolk & Onno van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past: the Flexibility of Memory and the
Engraving of Trauma,” American Imago 48.4 (1991): 425-454.

109

shared by Peter and Sally (Miller 199), her memories heal, her memories soothe. The
common past that Clarissa repetitively returns to is a prewar time, an idyllic time ﬁlled
with friends, fun and laughter, when rules were broken: “The strange thing, on looking
back, was the purity, the integrity, of her feeling for Sally” (MD 50). Septimus, too,
remembers, but his memories horrify, returning to him in a sudden, vivid, and “literal
return of the event against the will of the one [trauma] inhabits” (Caruth,
“Psychoanalysis” 3).44 His history is not merely recalled from his past memory, it is
haunting him in the present. Hi3 memories rend, twist, fracture. In one of his
hallucinations, Septimus sees the “earth [thrill] beneath him. Red ﬂowers grew through
his ﬂesh; their still leaves rustled by his head” (MD 103). Such traumatic memory has no
social component; it is not addressed to anyone and thus is a tragically solitary event.
Incomprehensible yet insistent and imagistic, Septimus’s reenactment of his traumatic
memories deﬁes “the pleasure of temporal continuity” so desired by both civilians and
the state itself (Bulter 259)."5 For instance, Richard’s favor of “continuity; and the sense
of handing on the traditions of the past” speaks to a desire for a coherent and uniﬁed
historical totality that ﬂows uninterruptedly from past to present as a continuous line (MD
177)

Clarissa and others have a heightened sense of the “splendid achievement” (MD 82)
and continuity of English history, culture, and tradition. The dilemma of the public’s

relationship to the traumatized is also elucidated in their distinctive responses to time.

 

4" Cathy Caruth, “Introduction: Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Trauma 11,” Spec. issue of A merican Imago
48.4(1991):1-12.

‘5 Concerning how repetition can be a source of pleasure, Butler suggests in a text on Freud's BPP that
repetitions "serve in part to bind the past and future together, to provide ritualized and sensuous occasions
for the invocation of the past and the convocation of the present. Indeed, what other route than repetition
instates the pleasure of temporal continuity between the irrecoverable past and the unknowable future?"
(259). See Judith Butlter, "The Pleasure of Repetition," in Pleasure Beyond the Pleasure Principle, eds.
Robert A. Glick and Stanley Bone (New Haven: Yale UP, 1990), 259-76.

110

 

Throughout the day, Big Ben, tolling the hours, progresses in a linear and continuous
movement that reﬂects an “imposed notion of time, the time of the state and the time of
modernity” (Edkins 94).46 The enormous bell in a clock tower, Big Ben, a symbol for
British Government, strikes the hour “with overpowering directness and dignity” (MD
178), recalling Ricoeur’s “monumental time” which has the sensible expression in
chronological time. Therefore, when Big Ben sounds the hour, it encourages certain
ways of thinking about the nation and its narratives of deference and patriotism. As
Laura Marcus points out, Big Ben is in a way in complicity “with the ﬁgures and
institutions of authority and power in the novel—the medical profession, commerce,
State, Monarchy, Empire[which] gives to clock time the train of power that transforms
time into a radical threat” (Marcus 80).47 Amid the panic and hustle surrounding the
scene of Septimus’s suicide, Rezia hears the clock striking, and she cannot help thinking,
“how sensible the sound was; compared with all this thumping and whispering” (227).
So when Big Ben strikes the hour—direct, downright—it urges people to “move, to go”
(MD 140). Thus, when Clarissa withdraws to reﬂect on Septimus’s suicide at her party
and when she hears the sound of Big Ben, she collects the dispersed parts of her self into
a social entity: “The clock was striking . . . . But she must go back. She must assemble”
(MD 284). For the traumatized, continuity over time is disrupted. Hence, Septimus gets
stuck in time, confusing the signiﬁer with the signiﬁed:

The word “time” split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips

fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard,

white, imperishable words, and ﬂew to attach themselves to their places in

 

‘6 Jenny Edkins, Dauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003).
47 Laura Marcus, Virginia Woolf (Plymouth, UK: Northcote House, 1997).

111

an ode of Time. (MD 105)
This literalization of time, of transforming words to new meanings, speaks the ultimate
tragedy of trauma victims in which they perform a dissolution between subject and
object. Traumatic memories are not narratively formed, so they defy communication
with others. Septimus mourns without feeling, memorializes the past without narrating it,
remembering nothing, yet can forget nothing. He tells a story of being trapped in
stopped, stuttering time in which no historical progress can be made. His story performs
a stammered history of trauma, literally told in the novel:

But if he confessed? If he communicated? Would they let him off then, his

torturers?

“I—I— ” he stammered

But what was his crime? He could not remember it.

“Yes?” Sir William encouraged him. (But it was growing late.)

Love, trees, there is no crime—what was his message?

He could not remember it.

“I—I—-— ” Septimus stammered.

(MD 148-9; emphasis mine)
For trauma victims, the idea of I, like that of time, cannot be positioned in a proper time
and place. Embodying traumatic memory as a text of fragmentation, shell-shocked
victims live within a story out of the control of the story-teller. They suffer from text out
of context. The story of Septimus is one that resists incorporation into narratives of
collective memory that privilege the pleasure of temporal continuity.

Just as traumatic events have no resting place in the psyche, narratives of trauma

112

 

remain disorganized and fragmentary. Traumatic memory entails a problematic
relationship to narrative; for Mieke Bal, “reenactrnents of traumatic experience take the
form of drama, not narrative” (Bal x).48 Accordingly, in order for the trauma victims to
facilitate storytelling so that others can understand it, sympathize with it, traumatic
memory should be transformed into narrative memory: “To enter memory, the traumatic
event of the past needs to be made ‘narratable” (Bal xi). It is worth pointing out that
within psychology, much discussion has focused on the importance of assimilating the
traumatic event into a coherently organized narrative of the past, and, perhaps not
surprisingly, the bottom line of all of this work is that the construction of a narrative is
strongly associated with psychological well-being.49 Jonathan Shay’s study of the
relationship between American society and the recovery of Vietnam war trauma victims
is relevant to our discussion here. For Shay, “The essential injuries in combat PTSD are
moral and social, and so the central treatment must be moral and social. The best
treatment restores control to the survivor and actively encourages communalization of the
trauma” (Shay 187; emphasis mine)?0 This process of working through trauma is missing
in Mrs. Dalloway, a failure that is symbolic of England’s irresponsible reaction to the

war’s outcome. Traumatic images, sensations, waves of affect, and perceptive worries

 

‘8 Mieke Bal, “Introduction,” in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, eds. Mieke Bal, Jonathan
Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover: UP of New England, 1999), vii-xvii.

’9 For instance, in “Narrative Completion in the Treatment of Trauma,” Psychotherapy 31.3 (1994): 415-
422, Jodie Wigren argues: “Narrative organize aﬂ‘ect and create identity and social connection. Trauma
disrupts narrative processing, by interfering with psycho—physiological coordination, with cognitive
processes, and with social connections” (415). With a note of caution of relying on narrative as the only
therapeutic method, Brison also agrees that “narratives contribute signiﬁcantly to such recovery is currently
accepted as uncontroversial in the ﬁeld of the psychology of trauma” (40). See Susan J. Brison, “Trauma
Nanatives and the Remaking of the Self,” in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, eds. Mieke
Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover: UP of New England, 1999), 39-54. See also, Shoshana
Felman and Dori Laub, M.D., Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History
(New York: Routledge, 1992), especially pp. 57-74.

5° Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Tiauma and the Undoing of Character (New York:
Atheneum, 1994).

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remain free-ﬂoating in Mrs. Dalloway. However, the news of Septimus’s suicide that
intrudes on Clarissa’s party shows that trauma is still active, still has the spectral power to
haunt and disrupt The danger that results from not dealing with trauma creates the very
possibility of traumatic repetition, symbolically or in action. This perpetual shifting
between traumatic memory and narrative memory produces a text of fragments that is the
very trauma of history itself. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Lloyd Gerorge, the
British Prim Minister, should say in 1919, “The World is suffering from shell-shock”
(qtd. Sherphard 143).51
III. The Trauma of History

Although Mrs. Dalloway presents traumatic experience through literal dramatization
of Septirnus’s fragmented memories, his sensory and bodily responses, and by
foregrounding anguished and emotional immediacy unavailable in historical analysis, it
fails to deal with trauma in a meaningful and healthy way when it ends with a party to
estheticalize the pain of traumatic memory. Given that Clarissa has the privilege to
appropriate Septimus’s suicide for her own 1033, the novel runs the risk of attempting to
conﬂate speciﬁc traumatic history with universal loss. Clarissa’s ambivalent attitudes
toward Septimus—a sequence of complex mixed feelings of annoyance, rejection, and
sympathetic imagination—resonate with the ambiguous feelings of the “shell-shock”
committee (Bogacz 239-41).52 Frustrated by the ambiguous and startling phenomenon of

shell-shock, postwar British society imposes forgetting rather than the hard work of

 

5 ' Ben Sherphard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Tiventieth Century (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 2001).

’2 Bogacz writes: “the ambivalence, antagonism and even confusion of intelligent men confronted with a
startling and ambiguous phenomenon for which little in their background or education had prepared them .
. . [and so]frustrated by the slipperiness and ambiguity of [shell-shock], witnesses and committee members
blamed the victims rather than the atrocious conditions of the Western Front. Such attitudes [are] in
conjunction with pre-war social prejudices” (239-241), see Note 31.

114

 

memory of war trauma, a wish that manifests itself in the form of denial and fetishism.
Locating trauma within a narrative of facade of normalcy so that life can go on as if the
traumatic reality of a painﬁrl past has never existed corresponds to what Eric L. Santner
terms “narrative fetishism” (144).53 Distinguishing the work of mourning that is “a
process of translating, troping, and ﬁguring loss” from narrative fetishism, Santner
writes:

Narrative fetishism, by contrast, is the way an inability or refusal to

mourn emplots traumatic events; it is a strategy of undoing, in fantasy,

the need for mourning by simulating a condition of intactrress, typically

by situating the site and origin of loss elsewhere. Narrative fetishism

releases one from the burden of having to reconstitute one’s self-identity

under posttraumatic conditions; in narrative fetishism, the “post” is

indeﬁnitely postponed.

(144; emphasis mine)
Mrs. Dalloway’s party is an attempt to expunge the traces of trauma by “situating the site
and origin of loss elsewhere.” However, as James Berger argues, telling the story of
trauma in this way “is not a method of working through but is itself a traumatic
symptom” (Berger 35).54 Rendered helpless and terriﬁed in trauma, trauma victims’
recovery is problematized when a culture does not provide a healthy “translating, troping,
and ﬁguring loss” (Santners 144). The disempowennent and disavowal of communities

and even entire cultures only exacerbates traumatic symptoms, forcing the traumatized to

 

’3 Eric L. Santner, “History Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Some Thoughts on the Representation of
Trauma,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution ”, ed. Saul F riedlander
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992), 143-154.

5‘ James Berger, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
1999).

115

carry what should be a collective burden. As many psychotherapists have recognized,
trauma cannot be faced alone and recovery is possible only “within the context of
relationships” (Herman 133). Viewed in this light, the avoided encounters with
unprecedented war trauma on the part of civilians in Mrs. Dalloway, I want to argue, is a
profoundly unethical hesitation to engage historically and meaningfully with the wounds
of the past. And this evasion of ethics demonstrates how Mrs. Dalloway, while a novel
about traumatic experiences during the war, becomes itself the trauma of history, that is, a

traumatic history “haunting the possibility of history” (Spargo 114).55

 

’5 Clifton Spargo, “Trauma and the Specters of Enslavement in Morrison’s Beloved,” Mosaic 35.1 (2002):
1 13-3 1

116

 

Chapter V: The Psyche that Writes a Suicidal Discourse: Narcissism and Trauma in
Under the Volcano
Much like Moses and Monotheism in which personal crisis and historical trauma get

entangled, Under the Volcano entails a form of apocalyptic thinking that involves the
assertion of a unique connection between an individual and the encompassing darkness of
history. The novel records both inner and outer disorder and anarchy which is Lowry’s
diagnosis of the modern psychic and political condition. On the personal level, the novel
follows the Consul’s journey to death step by step, almost in a clinical fashion, without
ever getting better of it. On his last day alive, the Consul centers much of his mental
energy on disintegration, decay, and ruin. Such an intensity of his preoccupations with
the injured self verges on narcissism: always the self, the victimized, narcissistic self.
The Consul’s narcissism, however, shows a digression from ordinary sense of the word.
He seems to be infatuated with his self, but the self he mediates on tends to be
fragmentary, decentered.I The Consul’s decentered narcissism presents a narcissistic
crisis—a wounding constitution of the self which looks it in a perpetual struggle to avoid
disintegration anxiety, while binding the self to an endless acting out that wounding.
Focusing more on the psychic wounding of the Consul rather than on his alcoholism, I
propose to read the Consul as a survivor of trauma. Lowry’s biographer Douglas Day
also analyzes the Consul’s psychological problems. For Day, the Consul’s drinking is
had indeed, but it is not the worst of his problems. In Day’s diagnosis the Consul is mad

(335), in the manner described by \Vrlliam James in his The Varieties of Religious

 

’ Tracing the presentation of voice in Under the Volcano, Patrick O’Donnell, in Echo Chamber: Figuring
Voice in Modern Narrative (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1992) comes to a similar view of the Consul’s
ambivalent narcissism: “All discourses seem centered on him, yet they reveal themselves to be decentered,
labyrinthine, and arbitrary” (131). The Consul’s narcissism, however, is not the thematic concern of
O’Donnell’s reading. Focusing on how voice indicates indeterminacy of identity, O’Donnell traces a
dialectic between a “voice of mastery” and a voice of linguistic hybridity.

117

Experience.2 While I hesitate to share Day’s radical view of the Consul as mad, I endorse
his psychoanalytic reading of the Consul’s problems. Instead of seeing the Consul’s
delirious consciousness as symptoms of madness, I argue that the Consul’s chaotic mind
which mirrors the equally chaotic outward landscape reveals what is now known as post-
traumatic subjectivity. Part I of this chapter discusses how an interdependency of
narcissism and trauma can help us better understand the Consul’s psychic wounding. In
part II, I argue that Lowry’s vision of modern history suggests an anxious historicity in
which the Consul’s Faustian fate anticipates a world on the verge of another war. Indeed,
Lowry went to some trouble to situate the Consul’s chaotic battle “for the survival of
human consciousness” against the historical realities of the day—the Spanish civil war;
Abyssinia; Fascism; the policies of the Cardenas government in Mexico; references to
Hitler; and most importantly, the anticipation of modern civilization mindlessly plunging
itself into another world war. Faced with such pressing and emergent crises—both
personal and political—neither the main characters nor the major world powers can
redirect the path away from self-destruction. Instead, the novel explores how each of the
main characters as well as western civilization can only self-destructively repeat their
traumatic past, groping “in the darkness of remembered ways”—as Yvonne writes in one
of her letters to the Consul after her departure from Quauhnahuac (346; emphasis mine).
1. Trauma and Narcissism

Many critics have been keen in noticing the narcissistic traits in the Consul, but they

 

2 Douglas Day in Malcolm Lowry: A Biography (New York: Oxford UP, 1973) views the Consul’s paranoid
fantasies as a result of his alcoholism. However, he concludes that alcoholism, instead of being the worst
of the Consul’s problems, is a symptom of his madness. Day uses James’s deﬁnition of paranoia to support
his argument. James writes, “In delusional insanity, paranoia, as they sometimes call it, we may have a
diabolic mysticism, a sort of religious mysticism turned upside down. . . . only this time the emotion is
pessimistic: instead of consolations we have desolations; the meanings are dreadful; and the powers are
enemies to life” (qtd. in Douglas Day 335).

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do so only in passing. Brian Shaffer is thus far the only critic who traces hints of
narcissism in the Consul. Linking the Consul’s problems—his alcohol addiction, sexual
difﬁculties, and sadomasochistic raging—with symptoms of narcissism, Shaffer argues
that the self -absorbed ex-Consul invokes the fate and doom of Narcissus, with one
portion of the self “watching the other deteriorate (with aesthetic fascination)” (145).3
The Consul, “because he is convinced of his own imminent demise, choose to luxuriate in
the aesthetic appreciation of it—Narcissus-like—rather than attempt to alter his situation”
(Shaffer 131). While I don’t dispute Shaﬂ‘er’s analysis of the Consul’s narcissistic
symptoms, I propose another reading of the Consul’s narcissism as a traumatic acting out
of his psychic wounds. In the following, I seek to explore narcissism as a key device for
Lowry to repeatedly link individual trauma with historical and cultural trauma. Before I
discuss how a narcissistic wound functions like trauma, a revisit of the myth of Narcissus
is perhaps necessary.

According to the myth of Narcissus and Echo narrated in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the
beautiful Greek boy falls in love with his own reﬂection in a pond. Presumably, this
amply sums up the nature of his namesake: a narcissist whose love is centered on the self.
Unable to love others than him self, Narcissus cruelly rejects the advances of the nymph
Echo and is punished by Nemesis to pine away exactly as Echo has pined away in
solitude. In other words, Narcissus’s death results from echoes of his own reﬂections.
What Narcissus falls in love with is not himself but watery images of himself, an illusory
self. The story is also complicated by the fact that looking at his own reﬂection,

Narcissus “does not recognize himself in the ﬂuid image that the water sends back to

 

3 Brian W. Shaffer, The Blinding Torch: Modern British Fiction and the Discourse of Civilization (Amherst:
U of Massachusetts P, 1993.)

119

him” (Blanchot 125);4 instead, he is tormented by the water imagery as Echo is tormented
by the image of Narcissus. Narcissus falls in love with an illusory presence of absence, a
nothing, that is. The watery reﬂection yields not a pleasure of self-recognition but a path
to death. Already underlying this beautiful but poignant myth is a moral lesson we all
know too well——self-love indicates a courting of death. Hence, Blanchot writes: “The
water in which Narcissus sees he shouldn’t is not a mirror, capable of producing a distinct
and deﬁnite image . . . . It is madness he sees, and death.” Hinted in this intriguing myth
rich in paradoxes is the dark side of the story little recognized by critics—Narcissus was
the product of his mother Liriope’s rape by the river God Cephisus. His birth, therefore,
is a reminder of a past sexual crime not yet redressed. Viewed in this respect, Narcissus’s
fatal attraction to the water image “seems to be a repetition of his mother’s near
drowning” (Berrnan 6).5 The moment Narcissus looks at his reﬂection in the water
already points to an uncanny return of trauma. Thus, Berman continues to argue that
“Ovid’s story darkly hints at a repetition compulsion principle, traumatic events
reenacted but not mastered” (6). Repeatedly entranced by his water reﬂection, Narcissus
unconsciously acts out a traumatic past. True to the Freudian repetition-compulsion
principle, such a traumatic acting out leads only to death. Therefore, Charles
Shepherdson argues that “the time of narcissism is the time of a disaster, the time of an
event whose traumatic character repeats itself at every moment, beyond the recovery of
historical memory” (134).6 Shepherdson’s point is that the trauma of narcissus

profoundly disrupts temporality that recalls the experience of war and other traumas that

 

‘ Maurice Blanchot, The writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln : U of Nebraska P, 1986.)

5 Jeffrey Bennan, Narcissism and the Novel (New York: New York UP, 1990).

6 Charles Shepherdson, “The Catastrophe of Narcissism: Telling Tales of Love,” in Topologies of Trauma:
Essays on the Limit of Knowledge and Memory, eds. Linda Belau and Petar Ramadanovic (New York:
Other Press, 2002), 127-150.

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Freud discusses in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Hence, his reading of the myth of
Narcissus has already hinted that Narcissus is a survivor of trauma, and his repeated visit
of his image in the water enacts post-traumatic subjectivity. The myth of Narcissus and
Echo is very complicated and can be explained in many levels.7 For my purpose of
suggesting the ways in which Narcissism and trauma provide a suitable means for
reading the Consul’s predicarnents, I will deﬁne narcissism as “a concentration of
psychological interest upon the self.”8 In the case of the Consul, it is a traumatized self
that be repeatedly mediates on. In the following, I discuss how Lowry’s Under the
Volcano illustrates what has increasingly become the psychological core of modernist
experience: trauma and narcissism.

The trauma of betrayal and abandonment are of central importance in the novel. It is
fair to say that on the Day of the Dead in November 1938, when the Consul is not
thinking about alcohol, his mind is mostly preoccupied with Yvonne’s adultery and with
his life theme of abandonment by people most dear to him. The Consul’s fear that his
world is a drama of betrayal and abandonment “repeating itself like a disruptive movie”
can be attributed to his family history. The trauma of his mother’s early death renders

young Geoffrey helpless in an alien world; he is also subsequently traumatized by his

 

7 When we think of the term narcissism, Freud’s groundbreaking paper “Narcissism: An Introduction”
immediately comes to mind. However, in his essay “Toward a Functional Deﬁnition of Narcissism,” in
Essential Papers on Narcissism, ed. Andrew P. Morrison, M. D. (New York: New York UP, 1986): 197-209,
Robert D. Stolorow points out, Freud’s model of narcissism as the libidinal investment of the self has been
criticized by recent critics, especially Heinz Kohut and Otto F. Kemberg. Since Freud, numerous authors
have ventured to redeﬁne the term “narcissism” to such an extent that the term means almost everything
concerned with the self. For an overview of narcissism, see both Stolorow and Pulver’s essays in Essential
Papers on Narcissism. Although Freud has been the reference point throughout this dissertation, I will not
adopt his deﬁnition of narcissism in this chapter; nor will I use other psychoanalytic theory of narcissism.
Instead, I revisit the myth of Narcissus and link it with trauma theory to read the Consul’s mental activity
on his last day on earth.

' I adopt the deﬁnition of narcissism in the Glossary of the American Psychoanalytic Association (qtd. in
Sydney E. Pulver 107). See his essay “Narcissism: The Term and the Concept,” in Essential Papers on
Narcissism, ed. Andrew P. Morrison, M. D. (New York: New York UP, 1986), 91-1 1 l .

121

father’s unexpected and unexplained abandonment when his father mysteriously
disappears into the Himalayas. Shortly after his father’s disappearance, his step-mother
dies, too. Such a succession of repeated life tragedies throws the young Consul into the
care of strangers, rendering him unable to be recovered from this early life trauma. At
one time in the novel the Consul associates Yvonne’s departure from him with his feeling
of being abandoned by his mother’s death:
And yet, he was thinking all over again, and all over again as for the ﬁrst
time, how he had suﬂ‘ered, suffered, suﬁ‘ered without her; indeed such
desolation, such a desperate sense of abandonment, bereavement, as sure
this last year without Yvonne, he had never known in his life, unless it was
when his mother died. (205; emphasis mine)
The Consul’s response to Yvonne’s betrayal is characteristic of trauma survivor—feeling
the assault of trauma as if it happened for the ﬁrst time. Viewed in this light, Yvonne’s
return to the Consul on the Day of the Dead provides not a possibility of salvation, but a
literal return of trauma.

Indeed, on the Day of the Dead, all of the Consul’s traumatic pasts seem to be
resurrected from the dead to return to haunt him yet again. These repetitions are notable
because they do not seem to be motivated by the individual, but appear as if they were the
result of possession by fate. Hence, with no clear purposes in mind, Yvonne’s returning
seems to be an act of fate. When Hugh says to her, “I’d like to know precisely what the
situation is,” she answers, “So would I.” Then he asks if she has gone back to the Consul
and she answers, “Yes. No . . . Yes. I’ve gone back to him all right all right” (114). But

she has no well-thought plans for saving the Consul, nor does she ever tell him

122

unequivocally that she has returned to him for good. The Consul has doubt in her
purpose of returning, too; he is more surprised than pleased with her return, asking,
“—Have you really come back? Or have you just come to see me?” Her answer to the
Consul is equally ambiguous, “Here I am, aren’t I?” (73).

Yvonne is the Consul’s echo, that is. As if summoned by his call, she returns to
replay the drama of betrayal and abandonment for the Consul before his death. When
Yvonne is dismayed at the Consul’s ruined garden—saying it is a wretch—the Consul
blames her for such ruins, using an analogy:

[S]uppose for the sake of argument you abandon a besieged town to the
enemy and then somehow or other not very long afterwards you go back to
it—there is something about my analogy I don’t like, but never mind,
suppose you do it—then you can’t very well expect to invite your soul into
quite the same green graces, with quite the same dear old welcome here and
there. (76)
Still unwilling and unable to forgive Yvonne’s betrayal, the Consul has to punish her by
physically failing her in love. Their attempt at experiencing yet again for the pleasure
they once had unfolds like a scene of sexual crime, a reminder of Narcissus’s visit of his
mother’s body violated in the water. The Consul enters Yvonne’s room, “innocently as a
man who has committed a murder while dummy at bridge” (84), and feeling at the same
time “ a sudden peculiar sense of embarrassment, a sense, almost, of indecency that he, a
stranger, should be in her room” (90). This language is fraught with hints at incest taboo
that the Consul fears of committing, but the hurt of betrayal looms larger than this fear so

that he has to make sure Yvonne tastes the feeling of being betrayed, too. Shortly aﬁer

123

their unsuccessful attempt, the Consul explains what happened as “a sign of my ﬁdelity,
my loyalty; any other man would have spent this last year in a very diﬂ‘erent manner. At
least I have no disease” (95).

As a narcissist, the Consul is the actor in his own self-directed drama in which he
appreciates his exceptional trauma-narcissism nexuses. On their way to Tomalin, the
Consul, Yvonne, and Hugh have unexpected encounter with Jacques, Yvonne’s former
lover. Ignoring Yvonne’s pleading to leave the J acques’s, the Consul deliberately draws
Yvonne and himself to revisit the scene where Yvonne betrays him with Jacques,
displaying a narcissist-like sadomasochistic need to seek suffering and humiliation. It is
here he also acknowledges that his love for Yvonne “ seems so far away from me and so
strange too, for it is as though I could almost hear it, a droning or a weeping, but far, far
away, and a sad sound” (205). The Consul does not fail to satisfy his compulsion to yet
again repeat the trauma of betrayal when he walks into Jacques’s room, wondering, “Was
it here he had been betrayed? This very room, perhaps, had been ﬁlled with her cries of
love” (206). A sight of Jacques’s naked body provokes an even greater excruciating pain
in the Consul as he imagines how Jacques’s body has “sought its pleasure in his wife’s
body [bringing] him trembling to his feet. How loathsome, how incredibly loathsome was
reality” (21 5).

It is also during this revisit of his trauma that the Consul thinks at length about the
notion of having “willed” Jacques to Mexico “for obscure purpose of his own” (219). He
sees the image of himself in Jacques; the Consul’s identity is split, with one part of
himself plotting to destroy his already shattered self. Therefore, it seems as if in

complicity with Jacques, they cause Yvonne’s inﬁdelity. The alcohol-induced insight is

124

 

unmistakably clear: “Was it not almost as though the Consul had tricked him into
dishonour and misery, willed, even his betrayal of him?” (219; emphasis mine). To make
sure the chance for reconciliation with Yvonne is gone, he slips under Jacques’s pillow
Yvonne’s belated postcard in which Yvonne proclaims her love for the Consul. Jacques
will ﬁnd the postcard at the same time when Hugh calls to announce the death of the
Consul. Earlier in Chapter I Jacques has also speculated that it was “as though the
Consul had calculated it all, knowing M. Jacques would discover it as the precise moment
when Hugh, distraughtly, would call from Parian” (32).

A narcissist is answerable for only himself; even his trauma cannot be shared.
Yvonne sums it up: “No, you loved yourself, you loved your misery more than I” (15).
Thus the Consul effectively damns any chance to heal his psychic wounds. In Chapter II
when Yvonne is arrested by a photograph labeled The Parting and projects her longing to
heal the cleft rock, she has the feeling of the other rock’s unappreciative of her eﬂ‘ort:
“That’s all very well,” it said, “but it happens to be your fault, and as for myself, I
propose to disintegrate as I please!” (56). The damage has been done and every attempt
at reconciliation is regarded by the Consul as belated. During the course of the novel, we
see the Consul seemingly struggle to ﬁnd love back, at the same time defeating such a
struggle:

Could one be faithful to Yvonne and the F arolito both?—Christ, oh pharos
of the world, how, and with what blind faith, could one ﬁnd one’s way back,
ﬁght one’s way back, now, through the tumultuous horrors of ﬁve thousand
shattering awakenings, each more frightful than the last, from a place where

even love could not penetrate. (210)

125

If the Consul repeatedly searches for situations to revisit his psychic wounds, his mind is
equally active in reviewing tragic ﬁgures from history and literature—the damnation of
Faust, the betrayal of Christ, Lord Jim, Macbeth, Brutus, Oedipus, Wilde, Maximilian
and Carlota; common to all of this heterogeneous mixture is atone of foreboding doom.
Even the Mexican landscape reﬂects his trauma; everywhere the Consul looks is abyss,
rupture, disintegration——all is fragmentary, portentous, and confused. For a narcissist, the
outside world is but a mirror of his inner world; hence, the psychological space that is a
“rudimentary and essential ability to distinguish self from not-self, does not exist” for the
Consul (Grace 275).9 His mind—in his own terms, his soul—is like the Mexican town
where electric systems don’t function properly. The Consul has a vision of his mind as a
town “ravaged and stricken in the black path of his excess . . . the whole town plunged
into darkness, where communication is lost, motion mere obstruction, bombs threaten,
ideas stampede—” (150-1).

Such a mind as the Consul views seems to be constantly harassed by the outside
world, but it is he who projects his own mind to the outside, thus breaking the boundary
between the inner and outer world. Thus Mexico’s history of betrayal and invasion is but
an extension of his own history:

What is a man but a little soul holding up a corpse? The soul! Ah, and did
she not too have her savage and traitorous Tlazcalans, her Cortez and her
noches tristes, and, sitting within her inner most citadel in chains, drinking
chocolate, her pale Moctezmna? (298)

Past and present histories emerge in his consciousness into an anarchic juxtaposition

 

9 Sherrille E. Grace, The Voyage That Never Ends: Malcolm Lowry 's Fiction (Vancouver: U of British
Columbia P, 1982).

126

totally at odds with itself. The mirror the Consul looks into is shattered; what he sees is a
delusion replete with ghostly images of sorrow and tragedy. The Consul’s narcissistic
fantasies serve in traumatic situations as protection against helplessness. In Trauma and
Recovery Judith L. Herman identiﬁes the core experience of trauma as “threats to life or
bodily integrity, or a close personal encounter with violence and death. [Traumatic
events] confront human beings with the extremities of helplessness and terror, and evoke
the response of catastrophe” (33).10 In the wake of trauma, Herman observes, traumatic
events “shatter the construction of the self that is formed and sustained in relation to
others” and “cast the victim into a state of existential crisis” (51). “Traumatized people,”
Herman continues to explain, feel “utterly abandoned, utterly alone, cast out of the
human and divine systems of care and protection that sustain life”, a situation which
impels “people both to withdraw from close relationships and to seek them desperately”
(5 6). Equally emphasizing the inner world shattered by traumatic experience, Ronnie

J anoﬂ-Bulman in her Shattered Assumptions: Towards a New Psychology of Trauma
argues that the victim’s exposure to trauma brings her to experience an “assumptive
world” no longer benevolent and meaningful: “[S]ddently the victim’s inner world is
pervaded by thoughts and images representing malevolence, meaninglessness, and self-
abasement. They are face to face with a dangerous universe, made all the more
frightening by their total lack of psychological preparation” (63).11 These criteria for the
diagnosis of post-traumatic subjectivity help to explain and summarize the different '
facets of the Consul’s psychological wounding in the novel.

Yvonne’s inﬁdelity and abandonment seem to contribute to the Consul’s drinking

 

1° Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Haper Collins, 1992).
" Ronnie J anoff-Bulman, Shattered Assumptions: Towards a New Psychology of Trauma (New York: Free
Press, 1992).

127

problem; at least this is how Hugh and Jacques see it. Yet else where in the novel the
Consul acknowledges his “sourceless sorrow” (78) and “his own fruitless selﬁsh ruin”
(346). Dimly aware that his suffering seems senseless and his life offers no explanation,
the Consul is still in agony. In the language of trauma theory, this type of behavior is
described as a “proto-experience”, an experience that has not been fully realized. Thus to
Jacques’ charge: “Have you gone mad? . . . . Am I to understand that your wife has come
back to you, something I have seen you praying and howling for under the table—really
under the table . . . And that you treat her indiﬂ‘erently as this, and still continue only to
care where the next drink’s coming from?” (214). Jacques wants a reference theory of
expeﬁence—-the Consul should drink miserably only when his wife leaves him. For the
Consul, the point about traumatic experience is that it is not something that can be
immediately understood. Thus, he accuses Jacques of interfering with his great battle
against death (226). In an attempt to understand his “vague tragedy and sorrow,” the
Consul drinks. In this sense, the Consul is not only the sophisticated personiﬁcation of
the unspeakable in trauma; he is also something of a fetishist. He supplements the bottle
for trauma. For the Consul, the bottle represents for “Bliss. Jesus. Sanctuary . . . Horror”
(132), an oxymoron suggesting diffusion and splitting. As Vice notes, the bottle for the
Consul is “a transitional object; it stands in for the loved and lost one, and he constantly
tries to incorporate it into himself by drinking it, again and again” (132). It should point
out that the Consul’s problem is not his drinking, but as he indicates, he does not “wish
merely to drink, but to drink in a particular place and in a particular town” (135)—-the
Farolito at Parian, where he meets his death:

Sometimes I am possessed by a most powerful feeling, a despairing

128

bewildered jealousy which, when deepened by drink, turns into a desire to
destroy myself by my own imagination——not at least to be the prey
of——ghosts. (374; emphasis mine)
As Chet Taylor points out, “drink only ‘deepened’ the death wish; it did not create it”
(146).12 Indeed, the Consul treats drinking as rhetoric for his suicidal melancholia. He
masquerades as an alcoholic so that he can better see this world as deception and illusion.
When he accuses Jacques of interring his battle against death, his battle “for the survival
of the human consciousness” (226), there is little evidence in his action for such a battle.
When the prospect of drinking in the Farolito—The Lighthouse, the lighthouse that
invites the storm, and lights it—ﬁlls “him with an almost healing love . . . for it was part
of the calm, the greatest longing he had ever known” (208), his death scene contradicts
his imagination. There is only chaos and murder that waits for him in the “paradise of his
despair” (350). More ambivalent is his prayer for Yvonne’s return:
Please let Yvonne have her dream—dream?—of a new life with me——please
let me believe that all that is not an abominable self-deception,” he tried .
. . . “I have sunk low. Let me sink lower still, that I may know the truth.
Teach me to love again, to love life.” That wouldn’t do either . . . ”
“Let me truly suffer. Give me back my purity, the knowledge of the
Mysteries, that I have betrayed and lost—let me be truly lonely, that I
may honestly pray. Let us be happy again somewhere, if it’s only
together, it it’s only out of this terrible world. Destroy the world!” he

cried in his heart. (299)

 

'2 Chet Taylor, “The Other Edge of Existential Awareness: Reading of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the
Volcano,” Literary Half-Yearly 14.1 (1973): 138-50.

129

In his introduction to Under the Volcano, Stephen Spender notes that the Consul is
“profoundly ambivalent, as his prayers show, for when he prays to be reconciled with
Yvonne, he also prays to be alone, when he wants to rise he asks that he may sink lower
still” (xxv), and when he wants to love life again he cries in his heart to have this terrible
world destroyed.

It is certain that the true end of this spinning chaotic world is “death, death, and death
again and dea ” (3 62). During the course of the novel, the Consul even imagines many
ways of his death. “Old Samaritan case to be reopened, Commander Firmin believed in
Mexico.” “F irmin found guilty, acquitted, cries in box.” “Firmin innocent, but bears guilt
of world on shoulders.” “Body of Firmin found drunk in bunker.” Such monstrous
headlines as there indeed took instant shape in the Consul’s mind, for it was not merely
El Universal the doctor was reading, it was his fate” (142). He is too submerged in his
“dreadful tyranny of self” to be able to distinguish the cries of love from the groans of
death. Since death and life are indistinguishable, he actively seeks his death in a
randomly systematic way. In Chapter X he orders “mescal” almost absent-mindedly
(292; Lowry’s emphasis), a drink that will seal his fate as he tells Jacques: “ It’s mescal
with me. . . Tequila, no, that is healthful . . . and delightful. Just like beer. Good for you.
But if I ever start to drink mescal again. I’m aﬁ'aid, yes, that would be the end” (225).
After that drink, it is a spiral downward to his death. He orders mescal again in the
Farolito, this time with sober certainly. Earlier in the novel before he arrives at the
Farolito, he has a vision of its Chinese-box rooms as “spots where diabolical plots must
be hatched, atrocious murders plann ” (208). The vision of course anticipates his

impeding tragedy, but his power of clairvoyance does not deter his maniac plunge to

130

death. Arriving at the bar, he is aware of being drawn by “some reckless murderous
power” and of its possible consequences (360). Lowry writes: “He could prevent it now.
He would not prevent it” (360).
To make sure his reconciliation with Yvonne is forever doomed, the Consul
deliberately sullies himself with a prostitute. In his agony, he sees himself
Surrounded in delirium by these phantoms of himself, the policemen,
Fructuoso Sanabria, that other men who looked like a poet, the luminous
skeleton, even the rabbit in the comer and the ash and sputum on the ﬁlthy
ﬂoor—did not each correspond, in a way he couldn’t understand yet
obscurely recognized, to some ﬁaction of his being? (3 74)
His identity is dispersed, lost, indistinct. The Consul’s tendency to perceive whatever is
external to himself as a reﬂection of the self ﬁnally synthesizes in the arrest and death at
the hands of the fascists. In his conﬁision, he sees himself the Chief of Gardens and
strikes that ﬁgure, a fatal strike that seals his murder by the fascists.

With the aid of alcohol, the Consul writes a narcissistic-suicidal discourse. Stephen
Tifft argues that this tragic conviction—that is, tragedy must proceed—is “an elegant
reﬁnement of the tragic mode: tragedy as a meditation on itself” (47).'3 The Consul
displays a poisonous obsession with a shattered self that renders no escape from the
repeated acting out of trauma. His life is trapped in a narcissistic ﬁxation on trauma,
characterized by an arrested process of pursuing death, one that attempts to go down into
the abyss of grief, to speak through pain, as well as about it.

11. Anxious Historicity

 

'3 Stephen Tiﬂt, “Tragedy as a Meditation on Itself: Reﬂexiveness in Under the Volcano,” in The Art of
Malcolm Lowry, ed. Anne Smith (London: Clarke, Doble & Brendon, 1978).

131

The Consul’s death, as Edmonds notes, forms “an intricate mosaic of doom” (69).
His death wish compounded by the political situation in Mexico brings about his
downfall. The world he cries out to destroy points both to his own life as well as to the
outside world. In this respect, the novel is both inward and outward-looking. Just as the
tragically enmeshed self is unable to extricate itself from the equally pressing
entanglements of politics and history, so is the world unable to stop itself plunging into a
global warfare. The Consul’s death therefore presents a grimy prophetic vision of the
future world war. The end of the novel seems to validate his earlier intimation that his
own destiny is mysteriously associated with that of civilization itself: “who would ever
have believed that some obscure man, sitting at the center of the world in a bathroom,
say, thinking solitary miserable thoughts, was authorizing their doom” (151). As John
Orr argues, Under the Volcano “set on the verge on the verge of World War II, written
during it, and published several years afterwards . . . can be read as a microcosm of
global catastrophe which anticipates Holocaust more than Allied victory” (I 8). '4 This
anticipating a world war to come is what Lyndsey Stonebridge terms as an “anxious
historicity” in which “the past runs into the unthinkable future” (27).15 Just as trauma is
less the eﬁ‘ect of shock than an anticipated repetition of it, an anxious historicity hovers
over, paradoxically, a certainty that a past trauma will repeat itself again. As in Under the

Volcano, this wonisome anxiety manifests itself most clearly in devices of repetition to

 

14 John Orr, “Doubling and Modernism in Under the Volcano,” in Malcolm Lowry Eighty Years On, ed. Sue
Vice (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989), 18-35.

'5 In her “Bombs and Roses: The Writing of Anxiety in Henry Green’s Caught, ” Stonebridge argues that in
Green’s novel Caught, “narrative chronology gives way to an anxious historicity” (27). Exploring Freud’s
writing on anxiety, particularly in lnhibitions, symptoms and Anxiety, Stonebridge notes, “Anxiety cuts in
two directions for Freud. On the one hand, it is a “signal,” a protective action that warns the ego of a
potential danger to come—“I am expecting a situation of helplessness to set in”. But, on the other hand, this
warning is efﬁcacious, because it is predicated on the repetition of a past trauma: anxious anticipation has
the potential to plunge the ego into traumatic anxiety anew and to devastate its defenses” (35). I think her
idea of anxious historicity equally applies to Under the Volcano.

132

evoke a melancholic vision of history in which the past cannot be properly mourned and
therefore threatens to paralyze action and thought. The novel responds to trauma by
anxiously “looking forward” to a world ready to be destroyed without offering any way
of coming to terms with the traumatic experiences. The ﬁrst chapter has already set the
repetition machine in motion.

Technically, the ﬁrst chapter can be termed a “ﬂash forward,” anticipating the death
of the Consul and looking ahead to the horrors of the Second World War. Notably a sense
of the second world war as a repetition of the murdering crime of World War I is
projected into a ﬁlm that is playing in Quauhnahuac—The Hands of Orlac, an artist with
a murderer’s hands. As Jacques contemplates a poster advertising it, the ﬁlm is “the
hieroglyphic of the times. For really it was Germany itself that . . . stood over him.—or
was it, by some uncomfortable stretch of the imagination, M. Jacques himself?” (25).
Asked if he has revived the Orlac picture, the theater manager replies: “Companero, we
have not revived it. It has only returned” (26; emphasis mine). Recurring throughout the
novel, this ﬁlm carries the weight of implications. Possessed by a demon-like
compulsion to repeatedly kill, Orlac haunts the text just as the text is haunted by the
presence of war.

The theme of failed artist turning to a murderer is further explored in the course of
the novel. Looking at the ﬁlm poster, Jacques has already identiﬁed himself with Orlac;
later Hugh will associate his failed singing career with another failed artist—Hitler. The
Consul has supposedly witnessed the burning of German POWs in the furnaces on the
S. S. Samaritan during World War I. Toward the end of his life, he is also mistaken by the

Fascists as a Jew. What Lowry wants to portray is an entangled history where a sense of

133

 

pervasiveness and inescapability of trauma demonstrates that we are all implicated in its
effects. Just as Yvonne, Hugh, and Jacques unwittingly conspire to bring about the
Consul’s destruction, the world seems to get addicted to its tragic history. Hence,
drunkenness is the most ﬁtting metaphor for a mad world. Hugh has diagnosed that the .
Consul, and by extension the world, is unable to recover from the addiction: “What’s the
good? Just sobering him up for a day or two’s not going to help. Good God, if our
civilization were to sober up for a couple of days it’d die of remorse on the third” (121).
The Consul as well as the world is chieﬂy concerned with evading its sense of guilt by
getting drunk. Drinking, as Heilman points out, is “as an escape, an evasion of
responsibility, a separation from life, a self-worship, a denial of love, a hatred of the
living with a faith” (Heilman 55).16

The pathology of anticipating the war without doing anything to prevent it reﬂects on
the death-oriented non-intervention policy adopted in the thirties. During the course of
the novel, Hugh’s guilt over his failure to save the Spanish War haunts him, but he also
views the non-intervention policies of the West as contributing to the losing of the Battle
of the Ebro: “If the paths of glory lead but to the grave . . . then Spain’s the grave where
England’s glory led” (107). Similarly, he links the world’s plan for self-destruction with
the dormant responsibility of the free world to curb the rising threat of fascism, an
evasion of responsibility manifesting in the sleeping Consul whose snore is referred by
Hugh as “the muted voice of England long asleep” (101). But while the world looks ,,
away, a repetition of the ﬁrst world war at an even larger scale is taking place. Outside

the novel, Munich Agreement was signed in 1938 of which Hitler took advantage and

 

‘6 Robert B Heilman, ”The Possessed Artist and the Ailing Soul,” in Malcolm Lowry: The Writer & his
Critics, ed. Barry Wood (Ottawa, Canada: The Tecumseh P, 1992), 48-56.

134

invaded Poland. Inside the novel, the effect of non-intervention policy is discussed and
acted out in Chapter VIII. Previously the political subplot surfaces by means of parallel
and analogy, mainly through Hugh’s anxiety over the Spanish civil war, but politics
becomes a main focus in Chapter VIII, a development which shows that individual lives
are increasingly invaded by politics; at the same time, politics itself becomes a pressing
concern in the novel. The scene of the dying Indian dramatizes the horror of non-
intervention.

On their way to Tomalin, the Consul and Hugh unexpectedly encounter a political as
well as moral crisis—whether or not to intervene to save the dying Indian on the road.
This scene is suggestive of a traumatic event repeating itself, for even the bus they take is
a 1918 Chevrolet. All the bus passengers remain indifferent to the dying Indian, who is
presumably murdered by the Fascists because of his job as a payroll rider for the National
Bank of Ejido Credit. Nor does the Consul or Hugh react much more decisively, for
“each knew the other was also thinking it would be better still should one of the
passengers, even the pelado, examine the man” (252). As all wait for others to act ﬁrst,
the scene is then sustained through an agony of indecision, until Hugh feels impatient.
He bends over ready to move the hat covering the Indian’s face but is deterred by a
passenger saying the law prohibiting the intervention. The Consul explains: “For his
protection. Actually it’s a sensible law. Otherwise you might become an accessory after
the fact” (252). The Consul’s attitude to the dying Indian is one of cautious non-
involvement, a policy that is adopted by other countries, too, for two diplomatic cars pass
by, also ignoring the shout of Hugh to halt and help. So they leave the dying Indian,

hoping self-cheatingly that the police will come to save the Indian. On the bus, Hugh

135

reasons that the ﬁnal obstacle to doing anything about the Indian is this:
It wasn’t one’s own business, but someone else’s . . . and looking round
him, Hugh saw that his too was just what everyone else was arguing. It’s
not my business, but, as it were, yours, they all said . . . and no, not yours
either, but someone else’s. (255)
In their failure to act they are unquestionably “murdering” the Indian symbolically. It is
at this juncture that the Orlac “murderer’s hands” materialize in the pelado’s hands
clutching “a sad bloodstained pile of silver pesos and centavos” (260). He has stolen the
dying Indian’s money and made no pretense to conceal such a theft: “his possession of it
was open and above board, for all the world to know about” (261). Still, the Consul and
Hugh look away, persuading themselves that there is nothing they can do about it, for it
“was a recognized thing, like Abyssinia” (261). This concept of anti-Samaritanism, so to
say, expands from the individual consequences of not aiding the dying Indian along the
roadside into the world-wide political arena of the twentieth century. Outside the novel,
it portentously refers to Hitler’s hands encroaching over the world.

The debate of non-intervention in Chapter X between the Consul and Hugh betrays a
complicity with psychic numbness which prevents moving toward recovery. The
Consul’s quietism and fatalism—“Can’t you see there’s a sort of determinism about the
fate of nations? They all seem to get what they deserve in the long run” (320)—reinforces
his belief that all action proves futile, for tragedy is doomed to repeat itself. Like the
Consul’s chaotic mind, the world is unable to extract itself from a self-closed destructive
circle. What is left to do is to hear the clock ticking for another world war to come: “the

ticking of his watch, his heart, his conscience” (349). When in Chapter XII the Consul

I36

reaches Parian, thinking it a dark, melancholy place, it reminds him of Coleridge’s poem
“Kubla Khan”: “In Parian did Kubla Khan . . . ” (351). The Consul stops there, but as
Markson argues, “the actuality of this particularity abyss at a 1938 fascist headquarters
might now lead us to recall more of the original” (190)—

And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!
His death vision of a world “bursting, bursting into black spouts of villages catapulted
into space . . . through the blazing of ten million burning bodies” becomes a real
catastrophe in 1940’s (388).

But Lowry is not thematizing history here. He writes about traumatic anxiety of his

time. In this respect, Under the Volcano shares much with Freud’s theory of traumatic
history proposed in Moses and Monotheism in which Freud also anticipates a trauma-to-

come.

I37

Chapter VI: Conclusion: “A Darkness that Murmured”

Faced with the overwhelming historical traumas of the twentieth century, both
Freud and modernist writers have sought to understand the peculiar phenomenon of
the psyche’s compulsion to repeat a painful past. In their encounter with the
psyche’s persistence of revisiting a traumatic past and its sudden reenacting of the
trauma, Freud and modernist writers both have unconsciously internalized the
cultural and psychic wounds into their writing, thus adding psychic dimensions to the
textual body. This traumatic enactment is also the fate shared by all the heroes in
modernist ﬁction discussed in this dissertation. Their repeated acting out of a
psychic wound brings them only to the verge of suicide. Coincidentally all the texts
examined in this dissertation end with the death of the hero. Their death is not a
redemptive sacriﬁce: it merely reinforces and darkens the overall vision of loss and
decline that characterizes the twentieth-century history. Their tragic downfall has
similar functions: it performs the traumatic meaning of the “death drive” that Freud
proposes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and so their death disturbs the narrative
closure. In this respect, modernist narratives do not provide means for working
through trauma; rather they call into question the process of recovery in the face of
the shocking force of trauma. The power of modernist narratives lies in their echoing
the haunting effects of trauma by giving an elegiac feeling of modern history.
Throughout this dissertation, I have tried to demonstrate that concerning a particular
traumatic event, a historical account aiming to give factual details of a painful past
fails to address the fateful repetition of the trauma on the part of trauma survivors.

And so it leaves literature to represent the unresolved impacts of a historical trauma.

138

This dissertation project has set out to address the idea of modernist literature as
a literature of trauma and has approached the argument in the context of Freud’s
writing on trauma as well as recent trauma theory. I have sought to demonstrate that
although trauma studies gained wide currency in the later part of the twentieth-
century and thus seem to work best with postmodemist literature, the fact that
modernist literature has preceded the emergence of trauma theory and has already
registered a cultural experience of trauma in the face of the epistemological shock to
the self remains to be addressed. Hence, this project has been an attempt to
contribute to examine how literary modernism especially aﬁer 1914 employs the
ﬁgure of repetition-compulsion at the levels of language, imagery or plot. The issue
of traumatic repetition can be expressed in two questions. The ﬁrst involves the
question of the relationship between, on one hand, Freud’s theorization of traumatic
repetition as an experience of a new phenomenon, and on the other, the ambivalent
nature of repetition. The second concerns the aesthetic mimicking of repetition-
compulsion both thematically and formally.

I have argued that Freud’s writing on trauma illuminates the key psychic
dimensions of modernist literature in that his writing mimics the traumatic effects he
is theorizing on. Thus the notorious wild speculation and the circular reasoning
found both in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Moses and Monotheism can be
understood as “narrative-as-trauma” in which both texts act out the cultural and
psychic wounds of the past. In this respect, traumatic repetition can be
simultaneously seen as unassimilated clinical and aesthetic phenomenon. In other

words, the psyche’s inability to integrate, or to bind in Freudian term, the damaged

139

splitting self echoes the disruptive narrative chronology that is hallmark of literary
modernism. For trauma assumes a space of dissolution, a ghostly presence caught in
a curious and undecidable wavering between departure and return. This arises the
question of to what the repetition of a traumatic event repeats. Anne Whitehead has
addressed a similar question regarding the nature of trauma; for her, the major
questions in the thinking of trauma can be summarized as “whether trauma itself is a
content or a form” (161).1 Whitehead continues to elaborate on the contradictory
elements inherent in the knowledge of trauma, for trauma “can be deﬁned in terms of
speciﬁc events or in terms of speciﬁc symptomatic reactions to events, and this
undecidability recurs throughout the literature on the subject” (162).2 It is here we
turn to the second question concerning the relationship between personal trauma and
historical events.

In several places, I have argued that the problem of addressing a historical
trauma can be ﬁgured through the force of a psychic trauma that literally possesses
one’s subjectivity. Thus, Gerald in Women in Love and the Consul in Under the
Volcano may both assume a representative historical signiﬁcance, for their split
psyche does reﬂect the chaotic form of a historical catastrophe. Here trauma is not a

speciﬁc event in an individual’s history; rather, the singular trauma is that which

 

' Anne Whitehead, Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh up, 2004).

2 The undecided speciﬁc historical event regarding trauma has been a debate among recent trauma studies.
As Geoffrey H. Hartman points out in his essay-"On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies," any
general description of trauma may risk "being ﬁgurative itself, to the point of mythic fantasmagoria" (537;
New Literary History 26 (1995): 537-63.) Similarly, in a fascinating discussion of the difference between
loss and absence, Domini8ck LaCapra warns against the over generalization of loss to include discourse of
absence. Advocating the process of "working through" the past and its historical losses, LaCapra insists on
making a distinction between the two. For him, loss is speciﬁc, historical, and traumatic, whereas absence
is general or structural. For a trauma to take place, LaCapra argues that a real wound/a disaster either
physically and/or psychically must be involved. See Dominick LaCapra, "Trauma, Absence, Loss,”
Critical Inquiry 25. 4 (1999): 696-727.

140

gives speciﬁcity to one whole historical period. Therefore, all the modernist texts
examined in this dissertation hover between loss and absence. On one hand, they
seem to be dislocated from a speciﬁc historical event; on the other, they foreground a
sense of historical rupture, decentering, fragmentation, erasure of identify, the
shattering of origins and ends—all point to a total devastation that strongly suggest
the central, most traumatic events of the twentieth century—the two world wars. In
this sense, the aesthetic singularity of modernist literature constitutes its historical
speciﬁcity in that the darkness that murmurs in history and in the psyche will repeat

itself in its even more horriﬁc magnitude of form—the Holocaust.

I41

WORKS CITED
Alter, Robert. “Freud’s Jewish Problem.” Commentary 93.1 (1992): 48-52.

Asals, Frederick, and Paul Tiessen, eds. A Darkness That Murmured: Essays on
Malcolm Lowry and the Nentieth Century. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2000.

Assmann, Jan. Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of ngt in Western Monotheism.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.

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