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Format:
Print
Author:
Giroux, Kari
Dept./Program:
English
Year:
2012
Degree:
MA
Abstract:
My purpose in writing this thesis was to examine the power of story in the experience of surviving trauma. By borrowing the theoretical language of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, I wish to demonstrate that whether or not an individual survives their trauma depends upon their ability to navigate through the territories of the Lacanian Triad-the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real. Because the experience of trauma is so violent, shocking or sudden, the psyche cannot encode it properly and thus, as Lacan describes it, it manifests itself as a "missed encounter." Cathy Caruth calls it "the unclaimed experience."
Like the territory of the Real, the traumatic experience resists formal expression. The undigested pain and horror then gets relegated to an encrypted place of silence and secrecy deep within the psyche. I will explore Abraham and Torok's notions of introjection vs. incorporation to describe both how insistent these repressed memories are to surface again, and how damaging it is to resist these returning voices. I will demonstrate the destructiveness of this tendency to silence the traumatic story is to silence and surrender the self.
I am also intrigued by how all of the texts I have chosen grapple with the conundrum of telling what cannot be told. I am also concerned with how a representation ofthe traumatic experience can both simultaneously cover over the experience, while bearing witness to what escapes the representation.
Absence and the impossibility of narrating what one cannot ever fully know, becomes a focal point then, of this exploration. Trauma demands formal explorations that often interrupt the traditional continuous time and space of narrative story. It is in these interruptions, like modes of absence, or encounters with the Real that unclaimed experiences find profound means of expression and bear witness to what can never be truly known. The notion of the Lacanian Gaze becomes an important factor in what it means to act as spectator/reader with these texts/films and creates the peculiar condition of seeing what you are not seeing.
Finally, I depart from Lacanian theory to argue for the authentic power of story that issues from a place beyond the formal structures of language.