Cathy Caruth drives me crazy because she glorifies the person who listens to the traumatized, making it seem as if though the listener to trauma is playing a heroic role: willingly becoming traumatized so that the truly traumatized person can testify. Dori Laub, child survivor, psychiatrist, and co-founder of the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimony at Yale University, is her co-conspirator.

Cathy Caruth is a big deal in trauma theory, probably the single most important person working at the intersection of literary theory and trauma theory, though Shoshana Felman should receive honorable mention. They share a lot, as the conversation between them published in Caruth’s recent Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience, reveals. Together, along with people such as Geoffrey Hartman, also a co-founder of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimony at Yale (and also interviewed by Caruth), they have helped transform testimony into an important literary genre.

Where Caruth goes wrong

Consider Caruth’s conversation with Robert Jay Lifton in Listening to Trauma: Conversations. Trying to summarize Lifton, Caruth says “there’s a double survivor situation, but a survivor and a proxy survivor, and it’s the meeting of those two that constitutes the witness.” (p. 18)

No! There is only one witness, and one listener. Together they do not make a witness. They make a team, one who tells the story and one who listens.

Lifton gets it right, agreeing that while the listener could be called a “survivor by proxy,” it’s the term “proxy” that should be emphasized.

The proxy’s important. You’re not doing what they did, you’re not exposed to what they were exposed to, but you must take your mind through, take your feelings through, what they went through and allow that in . . . . It’s an encounter, it’s an encounter and a dialogue. (p. 18)

Lifton is talking about an exchange between two separate people with entirely different experiences. It takes two people to have a dialogue, but only one to experience the trauma.

Dori Laub only makes it worse, stating in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, co-authored with Shoshana Felman, that

One might say that there was, thus, historically no witness to the Holocaust, either from outside or from inside the event. (p. 81)

What is true is that certain things, like climbing out of a pile of corpses, are so overwhelming that they can’t ever be fully shared. But no experience can be fully shared, even good ones, if by shared one means something like the communication of the same experience. Communicating experience, if the other is a willing listener, is like a translation from one language to another. It’s never perfect, and it requires not only a sensitive listener, but one who is willing and able to receive the feeling-tone of the communication, including horror.

Caruth: And you speak about the listener having to be in the place of the survivor’s trauma, “waiting for her there.” Can you explain what you mean by that?

Laub: The Gestalt [shape] of the testimony isn’t simply there [prior to the listening], in the form of a record. I compare this act of listening to the work of a midwife. The listener to testimony is in a way like a midwife. He imagines the baby coming.

Caruth: So are you saying that, as a listener, you make possible the testimony by imagining it taking place? Does your imagination, then, make that place that isn’t yet there?

Laub: Yes. (p. 57)

Not only is this not true, but Laub has already contradicted himself, referring earlier to one of the first recorded interviews with a Holocaust survivor, conducted by David Boder in 1946. There he finds a push to testify, a desire to tell the story no matter how obtuse the interviewer. “I remember listening to his taped testimony, and already in 1946 he was able to give a full narrative.” (p. 50)

Boder’s work is not well known. In listening to the dozens of interviews he conducted (all are available at: voices.iit.edu), I was struck by how ill-prepared Boder was for his interviews, asking if those who were shot by the Nazis had first been given a military trial. He does not even know how to spell Auschwitz, or where it is located. Boder was not alone in his unpreparedness, however.

What is odd about the Boder interviews is how unsupportive he was, in part because of his ignorance, in part because Boder was trying to be “objective,” taking his seat behind the interviewee and so forth. Nevertheless, the fact that Boder was unable to meet the witness half-way hardly mattered. The pressure to tell was intense, and most survivors told narratively well-developed stories. (See my essay on the Boder interviews in the references.)

Why Laub and Caruth exaggerate the role of the listener

Why does Laub remains caught in the grip of this idea, “an event without a witness”? I think it’s part of an intellectual tendency in literary studies, in which only the most extreme formulation gets listened to, whether or not in makes sense. Or rather, only the extreme formulation gets listened to, especially if it doesn’t make sense. I blame it on the influence of Foucault on everybody. Who can resist statements such as “man did not exist” before the modern era? What Foucault seems to mean is that a certain idea of man as a Kantian transcendental subject did not exist, but the qualifications come later. It’s the literary and philosophical version of the teaser headline.

Why does Caruth remain caught in the grip of the idea that those who listen to the severely traumatized also suffer trauma? I think it reflects her desire to share in the trauma, to be part of the action. In this regard she represents another undesirable attribute of contemporary literary criticism, the desire to substitute the critic for the text. Equating criticism with the creative act is not so different from imaging that one who reads about or listens to trauma is as important as the victim who is traumatized. It’s not true.

What Laub gets right

This does not mean that listening is an easy task, or that listening isn’t important. Laub’s suggestion that listening to extreme trauma invokes what Freud called the death drive (Todestrieb), which seeks to annihilate all experience, is not absurd.

Not knowing trauma or experiencing or remembering it in a dissociative way is not a passive shutdown of perception or of memory. Not knowing is rather an active, persistent, violent refusal; an erasure, a destruction of form and of representation. The fundamental essence of the death instinct, the instinct that destroys all psychic structure is apparent in this phenomenon. . . . The death drive is against knowing and against the developing of knowledge and elaborating [it]. (pp. 59-60)

Laub is referring to traumatized people, but Caruth immediately grasps that this applies equally well to those who listen, and is evident in such simple acts as not being curious (p. 61).

There are real barriers to communicating trauma, both within the traumatized person, as well as within the listener. My objection is only to what I consider an extreme formulation of the problem: that the listener makes the traumatic experience possible (knowable), and does so by becoming traumatized him or herself.

Conclusion

It is hard to listen to the victims of extreme trauma, and so we shut ourselves off. Not being curious is a leading strategy. In a sense we make the testimony possible by being willing to listen, for without listeners there could be no testimony. But we should not congratulate ourselves either. Those who testify to trauma have already done the hard work on their own.

References

C. Fred Alford, “What if the Holocaust Had No Name?” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, vol. 15, no. 3 (2009): 71-94.

Cathy Caruth, Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.

Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Routledge, 1992.

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Vintage, 1994.