Originally written for the Past as Nightmare Conference at the University of Reading
Discourse around trauma is characterised by a heavy reliance on metaphor; from black holes, to freezes, to open wounds, there is no shortage of euphemisms for the sudden shock and lingering dislocation associated with traumatic experience.
However, I’m confident no word exists, or could ever exist, that describes trauma in its totality. As Roger Luckhurst remarks, ‘trauma disrupts memory, and therefore identity, in peculiar ways’, namely, to quote Richard Terdiman, because while ‘the unconscious might seem to preserve pristine memories, as soon as that ‘eerie fixity’ reaches consciousness the traumatic memory ‘exhibits a positively wanton disloyalty to the truth’. Traumatic memories, while they preserve the core truths of an experience, distort all other details – including those of continuity. One of the most readily recognisable features of trauma is the compulsion to repeat the experience – whether through symbolic action or psychological imagining – effectively bringing the past into the present. This means the complete memory and nature of trauma is forever lost, even to those who experienced it first-hand. Furthermore, to Paul Ricoeur, ‘humans can comprehend time only as narrative’, as such, due to its distortion of the normal flow of events, trauma is essentially anti-narrative.
But taking the words of Jean-François Lyotard as a starting point – ‘that art cannot say the unsayable, but says that it cannot say it’– we can at least begin to articulate this ghostly but undeniable lack of substance. To Maria Jesus Martinez-Alfaro, ‘literature has become a vehicle for exploring both the disruption caused by trauma and also the possibility of healing by means of the attempt to transform the traumatic impasse into a story’. To do this, according to Whitehead, trauma requires ‘a literary form which departs from conventional linear sequence’.
To this end the Gothic is, and always has been, uniquely suited to giving form to the formless. This power comes partially from the special emphasis and specificity the mode places on the experiences of terror and horror, which Ann Radcliffe defines as P ‘so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a higher degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates’. I’m not simply arguing that the moment of shock that precipitates trauma is terrifying because, according to Radcliffe’s definition, it isn’t. Martinez Alfaro describes trauma ‘as a “black hole” phenomenon within which the light of awareness, wholeness and peace is absorbed’. This is more akin to horror, an experience that ‘contracts… nearly annihilates’. Yet, to Kirby Farrell, in its overwhelming of the fight or flight response, trauma induces a short-circuiting effect that leaves ‘the victim in a [state of] neurological hyperarousal […] vulnerable to distress that may emerge long after the crisis is past’.
So, after the horrific event has occurred, a period of extreme receptibility akin to Radcliffe’s ‘awakened faculties’ comes into being, leading to an odd paradox; is trauma the shock of the event? Or the distorted memory that’s formed afterwards?
Gothic terror and traumatic memories converge in Melmoth and House of Leaves – the first, regarding Helen; a translator living in Prague whose personal guilt merges with historical accounts detailing the appearance of an ageless wonderer, Melmoth, who comes to those suffering a guilty conscience throughout history. The second is the story of the Navidson family as told by Zambino, who’s academic essay recounts and interprets the Navidson’s home-footage of a labyrinth in their home that stretches on into infinity just as Zambino’s essay stretches beyond the limits between fact and fiction; as does the diary of Jonny Traunt while he edits Zambino’s work. As Gothic narratives, the novels make use of a structure that conveys ‘slippage’; for House of Leaves, the labyrinthine Gothic house is taken to an absurd extreme. In Melmoth, Prague acts as a kind of labyrinth, but really its time that Helen navigates – that of her own history, and that of others. But as the characters try desperately to make sense of these slippages, they only succeed in creating further narratives that themselves begin to slip. Because while trauma’s incompleteness and resistance to the linear flow of time is essentially anti-narrative, the compulsion to fill these gaps and enforce a coherent structure ironically, in Luckhurst’s words, ‘generates the manic production of retrospective narratives that seek to explicate the trauma’. While ‘trauma brings narrative to a halt, […] trauma’s stalling actively provokes the production of narrative’.
At the same time, the novels reflect on the futility and necessity of the ill-fated task of witnessing. They bear witness to slippages in time, space, morality and reason because they (or at least, someone) must. Even if doing so creates further second-hand trauma, witnessing is the only way to begin to move beyond the boundaries of these unstable worlds. In these texts, the point isn’t to escape or destroy the Gothic labyrinth – that would be impossible – instead, characters must learn to relax the struggle to do so. In bearing witness to its strangeness, and accepting the past, rather than obsessively seeking to recreate it, they prevent more corridors from rising out of the darkness.
But what does it mean to bear witness? Dori Laub describes three levels of witnessing: ‘the level of being a witness to oneself within the experience, the level of being a witness to the testimonies of others, and the level of being a witness to the process of witnessing itself’. There’s an ethical question here as to whether traumatic experience ‘belongs’ to one of these groups more than the others – it would seem natural to suggest that only the primary victims of trauma (those who were present as the events occurred) have the right to speak of it. Indeed, there is, as Laub notes, ‘in each survivor, an imperative to tell and thus to come to know one’s story’. However, Laub goes on to argue that this primary act of witnessing is insufficient, as the illusive nature of memory means trauma ‘can never be fully known to its victims’. The traumatic memory is so resistant to assimilation that, rather than pushing through the experience, it is instead repeated.
Therefore, the imperative to tell passes on the incomprehensibility of the experience to the listener, prompting Ashlee Joyce to describe witnessing as ‘a process not of understanding, but of transmission’. However, there exists a hope that, once traumatic experience has been transmitted, new light will be shed on an event that was never fully experienced in the first place. The unlikelihood of this is obvious, but many trauma theorists nevertheless see witnessing as a moral imperative for the same reason. Despite the unknowability of trauma, there is a compulsion in individuals both to tell and to listen, and though the core truths of the experience survive the journey, many details do not. Trauma’s propulsion towards metaphor, coupled with its essential unknowability, ensures each telling and retelling – whether by different individuals or the same – inevitably changes the story each time.
The transmissive nature of witnessing thereby creates a chain of interconnected but varying narrative threads; dramatized by the perpetual corridor of House of Leaves and the documents found in Melmoth. As primary victims, the Navidson’s mysterious documentary is a manifestation of their compulsion to tell that then passes into the hands of the elderly Zambino, who ‘witnesses’ their testimony and attempts to elucidate details overlooked by the original victims; finally, Zambino’s account is read by Jonny Traunt, prompting a mental destabilisation that compels him to tell us, the reader – in yet another attempt to unravel the mysterious corridors.
Likewise, Melmoth’s appearance throughout time forges what Cathy Caruth would call ‘a history [we] cannot assimilate but only repeat’. The globe and time-spanning structure of Sarah Perry’s book echoes Caruth’s assertion that ‘the attempt to gain access to a traumatic history […] is also the project of listening beyond the pathology of individual suffering, to the reality of a history that in its crises can only be perceived in unassimilable forms’. These structures act as fitting articulations of the way trauma spreads from individual, to second party, to third party, to group, and so on until the traumatic event becomes woven into the fabric of history and culture.
These convulsions in continuity and oscillations between narrative production and its opposite paint a picture of trauma as a paradoxical and shifting phenomenon, the nature of which makes the possibility of understanding seemingly impossible. Laub comes to a similar conclusion, conceiving ‘the process of the testimony as, essentially, a ceaseless struggle’. The cyclical nature of House of Leaves and Melmoth would seem to concur with this; though Helen and the Navidsons might find some relief, the nature of the documents they encounter point towards a broader history of trauma that hasn’t been exorcised, and never will. Through their reading, the characters brought the history of trauma back into the present, perpetuating the production of narrative in a way that implicates us, the reader; by reading their reflections, we ourselves become witnesses.
This becomes more uncomfortable when one considers that the core concerns of the novels, set apart from the fantastical elements, are rooted in real world history and current events. Perry and Danieleski have essentially created trojan horses of traumatic witnessing – they introduced highly fictionalised stories, all the while slipping in a core of truthfulness we cannot escape, even as the memories of infinite corridors and ghostly wanderers fade from our minds, to be replaced, perhaps, by our own perspectives, imaginings, and recollections of a history we never experienced, and yet cannot escape. But isn’t it better to know? Not more comfortable, certainly, it isn’t that, but when one watches a documentary or visits a museum, we feel we become part of history and carry it with us. We become a part of an unsolvable puzzle, one that, while it may never be finished, nevertheless depicts an important picture we can all learn from. The only thing to do, perhaps, is to turn back to page one, and read again. Maybe this time, we’ll see something different.