Finding Solidity in the Maelstrom: The Four Un’s

Originally I used this post as a starting foundation for an Invisible Man post but I actually think this is more useful as a general framework for thinking about the relationship between language, reading, psychoanalysis and trauma/crisis. Keeping this here as a reference point and a cheat for giving a little more space to engage with Invisible Man without that post being insufferably long. Also keeping it as a crutch for when the links between texts start to accumulate to a point of frenzy.

The Four Un’s in Five Premises:

1: Psychoanalysis and literature have long been connected due to their shared interest in the complex relationship between what we know and what we don’t know, what is seeable and what is unseeable.

2: A novel, to a degree, is readable, knowable and alive because it communicates, orders and preserves a narrative in ink. Thus if a story presents us with the narrative of death then *arguably* it makes death, liveable and the unknowable, knowable. Well, damn.

3: The story of an unbearable trauma is always paradoxically the story of that unbearable trauma surviving. If that trauma is a trauma of death, then that story, by definition, presents us with a crisis of life/survival and a crisis of death simultaneously. Does that also maybe point to a crisis of language if language is both ‘lack’ and ‘presence’.

4: If trauma is also, as Freud, points out, a missed experience or an absence then its textual recreation is also a living through absence and a making present of negation.

5: Language is itself traumatic because it is always marked paradoxically by presence and absence; something is communicated but something is always lost?? not quite sure on this. A literary account of trauma and crisis will therefore demand our comprehension whilst eluding it; this happens on a thematic and stylistic level. What we have then, in a literature of trauma, are the problematic paradoxes of [un]/knowability, [un]/readability and [un]/reality.

Conclusion: ‘Difficult’ or ‘unreadable‘ accounts of trauma require readers, like psychoanalysts, to comprehend experiences which they cannot fully know. Nonetheless a literature of trauma demands we listen to and make visible to ourselves experiences that have found power in finding a voice, even if that voice isn’t fully knowable to us. There is therefore a difference between knowing and seeing. Knowing carries issues of power, seeing carries the potential for reciprocity, social interaction.

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The soundtrack for this is just the small voice of confusion screaming in my head.