By Pradip Phanjoubam
The following is another extract from my forthcoming book written as a fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. As earlier, the footnotes and references have been removed to suit newspaper publication.
At some point, as the intimacy between the two characters grew, the woman decides to tell her new lover of her past lover. The fact of her keeping her past from her new lover was the cause for guilt. However, although the telling of that traumatic chapter in her life removes a dead weight on her, the act also loads her with a new burden of guilt – the guilt of betraying her dead German lover. If telling her of past is what she felt she owed to her present lover, the act of telling becomes a betrayal of her past lover. The guilt of telling makes her feel the sanctity of an intimate memory was profanized. This then is the deeply ethical dilemma of telling trauma history without betraying the past. The subject analyst’s problem in representing the trauma of the Northeast is not dissimilar.
The question also arises here as to whose representation of trauma history, the objective observer’s or that of the subject analyst’s, is authentic – the balance of reliability between the objective analyst’s account or the story of the witness, as it were. From the onset, the Japanese man denied the claim of empathetic understanding of the trauma of Hiroshima by the French woman, who identified her own personal traumatic history with that of Hiroshima’s. Upon her offer of an empathetic view of catastrophe, the refrain of the exchanges between the two lovers is: “You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.”
The implied allegation in the rebuff of the Japanese man is, how can a foreigner who is on a visit to Hiroshima, however empathetically the person sees the entire tragedy of Hiroshima, can even imagine the pain in the heart of someone like him who lived the catastrophe, having lost his family, relatives, friends, familiar emotional and physical landmarks etc. The difficult question is, if the empathetic outsider history writer’s account of a traumatic history of a place is not authentic history, whose history then would be authentic? Would the Japanese man’s own account of Hiroshima’s agony be a truer history, for this would be an insider’s story? But if this were so, and proximity to the traumatic event is the scale of authenticity of historical account, even the Japanese man’s account would be one removed from the real event. For if he were there in Hiroshima on the day of the catastrophe he obviously would not have been around for the discussion with the French woman. ‘The Japanese man has, himself, missed the catastrophe at Hiroshima. What he knows, therefore, of his story, as he enters the dialogue with the French woman, is that he himself “saw nothing” at Hiroshima. Yet this missing of the event, a missing that is different from the woman’s, resonates with hers in the passion of its argument and in his reference to his family.’
Hiroshima Mon Amour also plays on the idea of history and memory, and how they are often antagonistically placed against each other. For instance it juxtaposes the Western world’s concern for peace, with the site of one of the most violent and greatest catastrophes Japan suffered, the A-bomb at Hiroshima. Forgetting the traumatic memory of Hiroshima thus becomes the beginning of the history of peace and liberation in the dominant historical discourse of the victorious Western world. The French woman had come to Hiroshima to make a film and when the Japanese man enquires what film was it she was part of, her reply was pyrrhic in this sense: ‘A film about Peace. What else do you expect them to make in Hiroshima except a picture of Peace?’
The hegemonic equations between remembering and forgetting, history and memory, victors and vanquished, are quite obvious. The preponderance of one, predicates the subjugation and even obliteration of the other, literally and figuratively. The difficulty of honestly telling trauma history, Caruth reminds us repeatedly in this critique, is that while forgetting the past trauma and making a new beginning may amount to liberation, in this liberation is inherent a betrayal which only those who have experienced the trauma can best understand. The guilt of this sense of betrayal is a big inhibitor and often silences those who lived through and survived trauma.
Another inhibitive factor in representation of traumatic experiences follows from this. This has to do with the well established fact that many traumatic experiences are not easily claimable. One, in extreme cases this is on account of what in psychoanalysis is referred to as the ego defence mechanism of “repression” in which extremely traumatic memories which threaten the integrity of the victim’s ego get relegated into his unconscious as part of an automatic psychological reaction. Such memories are often obliterated from the conscious mind of the victim. The mind shuts off these memories so that the victim is spared of the ego threatening agony they can bring. These repressed memories however continue to reside in the victim’s unconscious and often surface when the person’s guards are down, as during sleep when they manifest as nightmares or when very strong cues of the traumatic events become available to the conscious mind. The tension between the conscious and unconscious selves sometimes causes neurotic behaviour disorders. Alfred Hitchcock movie “Marnie” plays on this theme. In a different way another of Hitchcock’s hits, “Psycho” explores this same theme with chilling effect.
Two, even when no “repression” has taken place, the difficulty in full articulation of these traumatic events can remain because there are no comparable parallels or scales against which to measure them. It is therefore difficult for the subject analyst to tell the story and hope to convince his or her audience. This is particularly so if the story is told to an audience outside of the traumatic experience. The question that confronts the insider analyst is, how do you tell these untold histories which escape scrutiny of the standard tools of storytelling?
The shortfall is also on account of the insistence in academic, and indeed more urgently in journalistic writings, on objectivity, as Tony Harcup points out in Journalism, Principles and Practice. By this approach, all information quoted would have to be able to stand up to scientific scrutiny. They have to be empirical in nature thus satisfy all the criteria of objectivity such as the quality of being replicable in laboratory conditions. But not all experiences are objective. Many exist as emotional states. The two are however very obviously interrelated. Objective conditions can lead to radical changes in the emotional states and likewise, emotional states can manifest, sometimes very violently, in the objective world.
The disenchantment with the proposition of objectivity as the only legitimate way of understanding reality followed disillusionment with the grand theme of the European Enlightenment which taught everyone to believe human salvation lies in empirical reason and logic alone, as many, including Harcup have argue. The euphoria over “progress” and “progressive thinking” was marked precisely by this outlook. Quite to the disenchantment of believers in Enlightenment, the period also saw some of the darkest chapters of history. Indeed, the 20th century, when this “Enlightenment” is said to have peaked, is today considered as one of the most violent and brutal century, having seen two World Wars, two atom bombs, many ethnic cleansing wars and not the least, the singular event of the Holocaust. A growing number of truth enquirers hence now see empiricism as necessary but not adequate condition in understanding the world and its realities. For how otherwise would persistent nightmares induced in trauma victims be explained in empirical terms? Do these nightmares have significance, and if they do, why would they not qualify as legitimate sources in the interpretation of reality?
To quote Harcup again, when he writes of journalistic representation of events, truth is not just about the facts of a given events. Especially when it comes to human situations, it must also be about a moral commitment as well. Empiricism has no need for this moral component of truth but minus a moral commitment, truths would be hollow. The case for a moral component of truth is argued powerfully by Dominique La Capra. In Writing History Writing Trauma he even objects to the idea that all history is trauma history for by this definition, victims and perpetrators all become victims of history. There has to be a distinction made, he emphasises, between the trauma of the victim, and what he calls, the perpetrator trauma: “But not everyone traumatized by an event is a victim. There is the possibility of perpetrator trauma… Such trauma does not, however, entail the equation or identification of the perpetrator and the victim. The fact that Himmler suffered from chronic stomach cramps or that his associate Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski experienced nocturnal fits of screaming does not make them victims of the Holocaust. There may, of course, be ambiguous cases in what Primo Levi called the gray zone, but these cases were often caused by the Nazi policy of trying to make accomplices of victims, for example, the Jewish Councils or kapos in the camps…… but it does not imply the rashly generalised blurring or simple collapse of all distinctions, including that between perpetrator and victim.’
If Himmler and Bach-Zelewski suffered from psychological disorders such as sleeplessness, unexplained sense of distress, nightmares, as a direct consequence of witnessing the mass murders and cruelty they inflicted in Nazi concentration camps, their conditions cannot be equated to those of their victims who suffered from the same symptoms because of the cruelty they suffered or anticipated. An objective approach that depended only on empirical data, as for instance, an assessment of these symptoms by a physician, would probably put them on the same medical scale and therefore diagnosed as suffering from the same disorders. Only a moral or ethical arbitration would set the two categories apart. The other problematic question that arises from this is, does the voice of the story teller and that of the victim/perpetrator give biased tilts to the story? Should the story told be totally independent of the story teller and the subjects of the story, as in natural science? This is a question extremely relevant and current not only in academics but in journalism too.