Published: July 2, 2005 By

[1] Scholars in the United States have traditionally addressed ethical and political concerns, and especially questions of socio-historical critique, social justice and social change, by allying the process of critical inquiry with the formation and reformation of identity, such that what we know forms a reciprocal relationship with who we are. The great, trans-diciplinary movements in the humanities of the last thirty or so years—the feminist, postcolonial, multicultural and queer movements, among others—have all used this strategy to their institutional and intellectual advantage, and the sophistication of their knowledge, methods and analytic tools seems to increase without limit.

[2] Yet there are nonetheless limits to what we know and who we are. Both knowledge and identity are readily annihilated, either simply wiped from the earth, or progressively erased by material and social conditions that, though they allow life to remain life, nonetheless render it unlivable (Butler, “Question”). Scholarship also owes its ethical and political address to such negations of the individual and of society, and in particular, cultural theory needs to examine the relationship between experiences of violence and practices of representation. How can we tell about the end of telling? What can we say about the absences of what we know and who we are? In the following essay, I discuss psychoanalytic and psychoanalytically-derived theories that begin to grapple with this problem, but I also supplement this work in two ways. I turn, on the one hand, to feminist and queer analyses of sexuality that will adjust psychoanalytic theories of trauma away from certain unstated tendencies towards normalization. But on the other hand, I turn to an American literary text, Faulkner’s 1931 novel Sanctuary, which offers, not merely an exemplification of trauma theory, but an unexpected transformation of both psychoanalytic and feminist accounts of identity and violence. Centered around a rape, Faulkner’s novel describes an extremely dense and complex scene of trauma, one which opens examination, not only of the relationships among identity, representation, sexual difference and sexuality, but of the articulation of these with those racial marks which inscribe the legacy of slavery, and which are never absent from United States culture. Thus, in its examination of the limits of identity, the novel serves as a principle of articulation among disparate categories of identity, including sex, sexuality, race, and American national identity, in a synthesis that will be of interest to many areas of cultural studies. This intellectual daring exceeds the limitations of Faulkner’s plot, and it is my hope that the theory of trauma, too, can exceed its apparent limitations.

Repetition, Trauma and Literature

[3] Freud’s interest in the psychic inscription of violence was prompted by a certain failure or incompletion in his earlier analyses of quotidian life. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), he notes the “compulsion to repeat” in many clinical instances: in the recurring nightmares of ‘shellshocked’ World War I veterans (10-12), in the repetitive “fort/da” game of his baby grandson, who makes a spool go away (fort, “gone”) and come back (da, “there”) as a means of representing and mastering his mother’s periodic absences (13-17), and in the transference, as analysands “repeat the repressed material instead of…remembering it” (19; emphasis Freud’s). The repetition compulsion is of great interest because in no case is the experience repeated a pleasurable one, and in no case does the repetition lead to resolution, to re-membering experience such that it can be understood. It is thus “beyond” the pleasure principle—beyond psychoanalysis’ power to explain psychic life according to a rational account of pleasure-seeking behavior. Regarding his case studies, Freud speculated that experiences of extreme anxiety and violent excitation overwhelmed the capacity of the psyche to assimilate them, a capacity that he understood to be physical in nature. The psychoanalytic name of this wound, at once of the mind and of the body, is “trauma.” (See Leys for more on the term’s origins and usage). The repetition compulsion, therefore, does not just challenge particular psychoanalytic conclusions, but forces us to consider the possibility of a limit to psychic life itself, a boundary on what we can represent and understand of and to ourselves.

[4] There is also a second way in which the repetition compulsion sends psychoanalysis beyond its own principles of intelligibility, one rooted in the fort/da game’s status as a practice of representation, of storytelling. Such stories compel others besides the compulsive repeater, and indeed it is the apparent exteriority of repetition to the individual psyche that renders it interesting.

This ‘perpetual recurrence of the same thing’ causes us no astonishment when it relates to active behaviour on the part of the person concerned and when we can discern in him an essential character-trait which always remains the same and which is compelled to find expression in a repetition of the same experiences. We are much more impressed by cases where the subject appears to have a passiveexperience…in which he meets with a repetition of the same fatality. There is the case, for instance, of the woman who married three successive husbands each of whom fell ill soon afterwards and had to be nursed by her on their death-beds. The most moving picture of a fate such as this is given by Tasso in his romantic epic Gerusalemme Liberata. Its hero, Tancred, unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda…After her burial he makes his way into a strange magic forest…He slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again. (23-4, emphasis Freud’s)

The “impressive” cases, the cases in which the cause and meaning of the repetition are most obscure, generate a moment of incomprehension, fascination, and repetitious contemplation. Furthermore, in seamlessly uniting these clinical cases with the literary instance, Freud postulates the fundamental identity of this fascination with the process of reading literature. To wonder about the woman three times widowed is the same as to read Tasso; indeed, this is a general claim that individual texts compulsively repeat life’s incomprehensible wounds. Literature, in other words, does not describe but inscribes trauma.

[5] Trauma studies has taken literature as one of its primary objects for over a decade, in the work of critics such as Shoshana Felman; but Cathy Caruth’s 1996 Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and Historyis the most comprehensive, and influential, theoretical articulation of a Freudian account of psychic trauma with literary-critical disciplinary practices. Caruth’s central claim is that “the poetic story can be read…as a larger parable, both of the unarticulated implications of the theory of trauma in Freud’s writing and, beyond that, of the crucial link between literature and theory” (Caruth 3). In other words, not only should literature be reread as an extension of Freudian accounts of material and psychic trauma, but trauma should be read in/as literature. The “crucial link between literature and theory” is not some more or less arbitrary connection forged by the field-definition and field-coverage model of disciplinary expansion, but a vital imperative generated by the practice of rereading itself. Insofar as academic literary study is definable as professional rereading, Caruth aims not merely to influence some sector of the profession, but to reframeall professional literary-scholarly activity in terms of psychoanalytic and historical accounts of trauma. From this point of view, reading and criticism, though based in deep knowledge, are also an encounter, at once ethical and epistemological, with that which we cannot describe or know.

[6] Caruth integrates her theorization of trauma with a series of traumatic readings—of Freud, Duras and Resnais’ film Hiroshima Mon Amour, de Man, Kleist, Kant, and Lacan. This list reflects Caruth’s disciplinary commitments as a comparativist working on 20th-century Europe, but it is also prompted by traumatic extra-textual events, preeminently the Second World War and its radical destructions. As she writes in her introduction, “these texts, each in its turn, asks what it means to transmit and to theorize around a crisis that is marked, not by a simple knowledge, but by the ways it simultaneously defies and demands our witness” (5). This is a repetition, like that of the traumatic nightmare: the critic, having finished reading, having undertaken the work of transmission and theorization, having finished her book and turned to the task of introducing it, again finds herself before the text—face-to-face with it, but also ‘before’ it in a strangely literal way, again confronting the question “What does it mean to transmit and theorize around this crisis?” Thus, the critic’s relationship to the traumatic text is a form of responsibility based in a writerly, but not therefore the less real/Real, experience of the text’s trauma.

[7] Though this insistent questioning of the critic by the text arrives as a shock, it is also familiar, perhaps especially so in an internationalist and comparativist context. The Americanist Christina Zwarg notes that the defiance and demand of the traumatic text evokes the text “to be translated” (7). In translation, too, incomprehension is repetitive, and irrecuperable loss of meaning coexists with the imperative to transmit and theorize. Zwarg further suggests that this reading situation, far from signaling the failure of interpretation, not only allows interpretation to continue, but preserves the scene of translation from totalizing accounts of meaning: “The imperative of translation (what does she want from me?) is the ironic motor encouraging the latent ethical persuasion that one interpretation should not be allowed to master and subdue all others” (9). Thus, the traumatic text’s demand is also an imperative—to continue reading in and through trauma, to continually re-examine, and regard as incomplete, our understanding of who we are and what we know.

Key Figures

[8] Zwarg’s comparison of trauma to translation has special significance for trauma-theoretical considerations of American literature. Some critical ‘translation’—some intense work on rearticulating who we are and what we know—will be required to bring theories based in 19th– and 20th-century European thought to the United States. This is reflected in Zwarg’s critical consideration of W.E.B. Du Bois’s subtle, hybrid text on the relationships among identities and knowledge, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), which has significant and complex debts to German philosophy.  “[T]he traumatic injuries of slavery (and mastery)” which persist from the 19th century, and which United States culture and literature “converted into elaborate psychic enclaves having both horrific and healing ideological power” (Zwarg 3) require specific analytic tools, for the stories about violence, history, sexuality, body, psyche, woman, race, nation, that American literature tells, will necessarily differ from the traumatic narratives that arise from other cultures and historical moments. Trauma theory itself cannot simply be transferred to another milieu; it must be translated.

[9] Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience offers a particularly rich opportunity for such translation, for it seeks to establish, not merely the presence of trauma in literature, but an irreducible kernel of traumatic representation. Caruth offers a set of archetypes for traumatic reading, designated “key figures.”

“My main endeavor is…to trace in each of these texts a different story, the story or the textual itinerary of insistently recurring words or figures. The key figures my analysis uncovers and highlights—the figures of ‘departure,’ ‘falling,’ ‘burning’ or ‘awakening’—in their insistence, here engender stories that in fact emerge out of the rhetorical potential and the literary resonance of these figures, a literary dimension that cannot be reduced to the thematic content of the text or to what the theory encodes, and that, beyond what we can know or theorize about it, stubbornly persists in bearing witness to some forgotten wound.” (Caruth 5)

[10] These “key figures”(“”departure,” “falling,” “burning”…”awakening””) are originally the narrative interruptions that inscribe a particular text’s trauma. “Awakening,” for instance, comes from the “dream of the burning child,” discussed in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, and again in Lacan’s Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. In the original case-study, a father dreams that his child, lately dead of a fever and laid out in preparation for burial, returns and tells him that ‘I am burning.’ He awakens to find the candles fallen over and the grave-clothes alight. The dream, therefore, bespoke both the necessity of awakening (to put out the fire) and the desire to sleep (to speak once again to his lost child); and first Freud, then Lacan, and finally Caruth, use it to examine the possibly traumatic nature of consciousness itself. Caruth thus offers the “figure” of “awakening” as both an indication of the philosophical consideration of traumatic experience, and as a constant return to the moment itself, the jerk into awareness of disaster that is both the source and the end of the analysis.

[11] More abstractly, the term “figure” connotes both “trope” (or “figure of speech”) and “human body.” This doubled sense implies that any particular representation of a human figure under violent attack is already “figurative,” already a trope of a trauma which must be, according to Freud, inaccessible in itself. If a trope is, etymologically, a “turn,” “key figure” designates both the crucial work of “turning” un-representable wounding into a literary representation of loss, and the repetitious “re-turn” of this same, incomplete transformation. The “key figures” Caruth mentions, “departure,” “falling,” “burning” and “awakening,” all name traumatic physical displacements or transformations of a body, and all seek to name a psychic and philosophical correspondence to such a traumatic event.

[12] It is in this movement, from representation of bodily trauma to narration of traumatic experience, that the specificities of traumatic theories begin to come to light, and the imperative to translate reasserts itself. This regularized set of “key figures” implies that the body under trauma was previously, originally whole and legible, and only subsequently wounded by violent history. It had not departed, fallen, burned, awakened, or been otherwise impinged upon. This is an ideal, pure state of the body, which can only exist in fantasy, and such fantasy has determinative effects on Caruth’s readings. Her discussions assume that the traumas of history are like the occupation of France, or the atomic bombing of Japan: singular, extreme, confined to a short period of time, and readily identifiable as radically destructive of moral norms and assumptions. For this reason, Caruth’s confrontation with the traumas of war sits uneasily with American literature’s representations of slavery and its historical legacy. The violences of enslavement and racism in American literature and history were and are quotidian, peace-time practices, fully integrated with public and private morality. Thus, Caruth’s effort to theorize trauma and literature seems to have been delimited by its description of historical trauma.

[13] Nor is this trauma-free prehistory the only translation problem associated with “key figures.” Describing their operation within literature, Caruth says that “in their insistence, [the key figures] engender stories that in fact emerge out of the rhetorical potential and the literary resonance of these figures” (5). This strange cluster of figurative language further narrates the “key figures.” They “engender stories,” that “in fact emerge” from “[their] rhetorical potential and…literary resonance.” “Key figures,” in other words, move rapidly from an anxious story about sex, reproduction and unclear boundaries to a triumphant story about kinship (the stories are the children of the figures) and mastery (the figures possess “rhetorical potential and literary resonance”). Thus, the identification of the human “figure” under trauma with the “figurative” powers of language to re-present trauma, and hence of Freudian trauma with literary criticism, collapses into a highly particular set of bodily tropes, those of the individual’s assumption of their sex, their sexuality, and their kinship relations, which psychoanalysis groups together under the name of Oedipus.

[14] In other words, just as a fantasized, pre-traumatic body returns as the repressed of the “key figures,” so too do  ‘normal,’ Oedipal traumas return as the repressed of abnormal traumas (war, genocide, political violence, untimely death). The excessive, unstoppable, compulsive repetitions of a trauma beyond ordinary experience are, in practice, reduced to the quotidian work of acceding to the psychic violence of castration. Caruth’s work relies on the Family Romance, or, what comes to the same thing under the sign of Oedipus, heterosexual romance. There is a certain sameness across all of her readings. The subject of trauma might depart, fall, burn, or awake, but what he (or, in one case, she) says is all about the lost beloved—a woman’s lost male lover, as in Hiroshima mon amour, a baby boy’s lost mother, as in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a father’s lost child, as in the dream of the burning child. In two of Caruth’s readings, the beloved is, under a pure Freudian orthodoxy of sublimation, “love of country or some ideal”—the Vienna Freud was forced to flee, and Paul de Man’s habitually European objects of inquiry.

[15] Romance and its conventions, however, are seriously askew in American literature. In 1960, Leslie Fiedler described “the archetypal image, found in our favorite books, in which a white and a colored American male flee from civilization into each other’s arms” (Fiedler 12). He offered this as a “key figure,” if you will, for American literature: Huck and Jim, Ishmael and Queequeg, the story, not of the infinitely receding beloved, but rather of a consummation too sublime to be named. Fiedler’s emphasis on the simultaneity of transgressive sexuality with transgressions of the color line offers rich, yet treacherous material for the theorization of trauma. For to approach the traumas inflicted under the sign, not of Oedipus/ normality, but of queer and interracial desire, we must consider violences, not just towards identity and knowledge, but within the standards of kinship, identity and knowledge themselves. Such are the violences, as Hortense Spillers has elegantly written, of the slave regime, and of the increasing racism and racial violence against African-Americans that followed the end of Reconstruction. In order for us to proceed, then, not only trauma studies, but the psychoanalytic method itself, and especially its reliance on Oedipality, have to be read as traumatized.

Traumas of Race, Traumas to Theory

[16] Both psychoanalysis generally and its theorizations of trauma in particular have specific engagements with racial difference, which are themselves often entwined with the limit-cases of sexuality. These irregular moments, when psychoanalysis imagines a body crisscrossed with physical differences and power differentials that go beyond accepted psychoanalytic principles of intelligibility, have about them the air of a missed opportunity, or even of an institutionalized repression. In her fascinating study of racialized fantasies in the work of women analysts of the 1920’s and 30’s, Fair Sex, Savage Dreams(2001), Jean Walton writes:

“Psychoanalysis could…have functioned as a counter-discourse to racist psychological and psychiatric accounts of human diversity. But, while it seemed to thrive on the ‘eternal problem’ of how to extend and modify Freud’s male-centered theories of sexual development so that they would be equally as applicable to women, it shrank from the charge that it was focused too narrowly on the white European patients who provided the clinical material from which it was elaborated. It is as if treating perceived and fantasized racial difference as potentially constitutive of psychic development would have been too threatening to the integrity of the psychoanalytic project—suggesting that this integrity was, after all, based on its unacknowledged racial whiteness, by which I mean the whiteness of both its analysts and objects of study.” (Walton 2)

I take Walton’s antiracist critique as axiomatic intellectual history, but her perspective also offers meta-critical opportunities for trauma theory, and specifically for examining Oedipal figures in trauma studies. Indeed, her description of racism (and the majority of her examples deal with images of Africans, African-Americans, and “blackness”) as “too threatening to the integrity of the psychoanalytic project,” as having the capacity to render everything psychoanalysis has to say (about sexuality, desire, the unconscious) meaningless at one fell swoop, is itself a figure of trauma to Oedipality.

[17] The problem before us, then, is not to articulate racial difference and traumatic experience with normative psychoanalytic accounts of sexuality, but rather to examine trauma in its inter-implication with race and sex in the United States. In the readings of Faulkner’sSanctuary (1931) that follow, I describe the raced, sexual body as an effect of trauma. Temple Drake, the white, Southern (anti-)heroine ofSanctuary, negotiates a socially-approved, even socially mandated, sexual assault on her body through the figuration of racial and sexual difference, and specifically through manipulations of the highly particular, hyper-sexualized American racial denigration of African-Americans. Faulkner carves out a paradoxical, anti-anatomical, unsustainable and atemporal position for a white woman as participant in, and subverter of, the racialized scene of heterosexuality. Sanctuary‘s expression of a trans-textual logic of trauma is thus offered as a supplement to Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience—Temple Drake’s transgressions of the color line as another “key figure,” if you will, one particularly suited to Americanist literary and cultural criticism.

[18] But Faulkner’s novel, which bypasses all but the most minor African-American characters in favor of a free-floating rhetoric of racism, and whose omnipresent irony begins with the title and ends with the collapse of sexual violation into sexual pleasure, also denies the possibility of any final ‘understanding’ of trauma, any way to resolve the inability to represent with representation. Apropos of this impasse, Derrida writes: “The scene of the fort/da, whatever its exemplary content, is always in the process of describing in advance, as a kind of deferred overlapping, the scene of its own description. The writing of a fort/da is always a fort/da…”(321). It is impossible, in other words, to make absence—the absence of meaning, the wounding absence in the body—go away.

Traumas in/as Theory

[19] As a frame for my discussion of the novel, I would like now to turn to an important theorization of the body, Judith Butler’s “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary” (1993). Though it might seem far removed from the scene of trauma—a figure of uncanny presence, rather than uncanny lack, taken from an expansive, rather than a self-limiting critical project—the lesbian phallus offers an elegant means for addressing the relationship between bodily difference and psychic trauma. In her essay, Butler discusses the limits of the body in Freud, particularly “On Narcissism” (1914) andThe Ego and the Id (1923). Freud argues that the body acquires boundaries and a psychic presence—a development essential to the development of an ego—through the narcissistic investment of libido in bodily discomfort, and maintains that “the prototype” of an uncomfortable organ is “the [male] genital organ in its states of excitation” (Freud “On Narcissism” 84). The phallus thus conceptualized is still arbitrarily masculine, but the formulation maintains the possibility that some other organ besides the penis can be uncomfortably excited, and Butler further notes that the association of pain with pleasure maintains an ambivalence, rather than a sexist triumphalism, about the power of that organ to compel the psyche. That ambivalence is tied to trauma; the repetitions of a pain or a wound come to be the same thing as the repeated blows to the sexual organ that invest the body with libido.

[20] Butler’s qualifier “lesbian,” though in part reflecting a discussion of the politics of lesbian sexuality (65-66, 85), is intended to continually emphasize the arbitrary and negotiable site of the phallus on the body. It also serves to radically undermine any attempt to reintroduce normalization—that is, to reintroduce the Oedipus complex as a resolver of subjective trauma, the substitution of one love object for another as a means of making good on an irrecuperable loss, and the assumption of one’s sex as an answer to the ambivalence of bodily investment through trauma. In other words, “lesbian phallus” unites in a single “figure” trauma’s involvement with the physical body and its implication in representational practices, while resisting the failures of Caruth’s “key figures”—their twin collapses into an idealized, pre-traumatic body and into a conservative narrative of Romance. Thus the subject with a lesbian phallus cannot have her phallus taken away from her (for instance, by the fact that she does not have a penis), and she cannot have her trauma taken away from her (for instance, by the construction of a ‘normal’ sexual life). The possessor of a lesbian phallus is on her own, both in the sense of having an unusual power of psychic self-determination, and in the sense of having no safety in the world.

[21] The fictional character Temple Drake has these things: an impressive power of self-invention, a near-total vulnerability, and, as shall been seen, a curiously literal ‘lesbian phallus.’ This seems appropriate, for “indeed, ‘the’ lesbian phallus is a fiction, but perhaps a theoretically useful one, for there are questions of imitation, subversion, and the recirculation of phantasmatic privilege that a psychoanalytically informed reading might attend” (85). But for Temple, this play of differences and trauma takes racial difference as well as, and simultaneously with, sexual difference, as its opportunity for “imitation, subversion, and the recirculation of phantasmatic privilege.”

Temple

[22] Temple Drake is a white “coed” whose rape, by the bootlegger Popeye, is the central incident of the novel. Yet the crime is difficult to disengage from the general condition of Temple’s life. She almost never appears alone; her body is in constant, explicitly sexual exchange among boyfriends, bystanders, bootleggers, bootleggers’ common-law wives, a madam, lawyers, various male family members, and finally, in a climactic courtroom scene, as she gives misleading testimony against an innocent man, the public institutions of the law. It is as if every single white patriarchal institution extant in 1930’s Mississippi must be guaranteed by the sharing out of Temple among the men or their representatives.

[23] Temple’s only first-person account of her experiences, and the novel’s only extended examination of the status and meanings of her body, is a phantasmagoric drunken monologue, over 6 pages long, that first describes and then begins to enact, after the fact of her rape, a continually recycled trauma, her repetitive experience of the fear of rape, attempted rape and rape. She describes cowering, defenseless, in a room at the bootleggers’ house, but in the telling her fear is shortly transformed into something else:

“That was when I got to thinking a funny thing. You know how you do when you’re scared. I was looking at my legs and I’d try to make like I was a boy. I was thinking about if I just was a boy and then I tried to make myself into one by thinking. You know how you do things like that. Like when you know one problem in class and when they came to that you look at him and think right hard, Call on me. Call on me. I’d think about what they tell children, about kissing your elbow, and I tried to. I actually did. I was that scared, and I’d wonder if I could tell when it happened. I mean, before I looked, and I’d think I had and how I’d go out and show them—you know. (216-17)

She wants to wrest her body over to the other side of sexual difference, but she doesn’t describe that radical bodily transformation as traumatic, as involving incomprehensible violence that must nevertheless be repetitiously approached through an effort at understanding. The fantasy of gaining a penis, in other words, is opposed in affective substance as well as in form to the fantasy of castration. It comes out as a childish fantasy of normal accomplishment. It isn’t scary, somehow.

[24] Yet the monologue nonetheless generates extreme anxiety in the reader (as well as in Temple’s interlocutor, Horace Benbow, the ineffectual defense lawyer), and it is this anxiety that points to the status of Temple’s fantasy-penis as a lesbian phallus. Temple describes staving off her continual anticipation of rape by imagining strategies for making a penis appear (thinking hard, kissing her elbow, counting to a hundred, holding her breath, replacing it with a spiked chastity belt) for some time. Though her imagined penis is not material, not an organ literally engorged with pain and thereby erotically invested, the continual doubt in which it exists is like enough to pain, for Temple and for the reader. It is always gone, and always appearing, always indicating by this repetition the presence of an unnamable trauma, identical with, the same as the presence of, Temple’s vagina. Temple invests her body with meaning, a meaning that will defend it from the negation of rape, through the “uncomfortable excitation” in/of an organ that doesn’t exist. The effect is like the collapse of “fort…da” into one long scream. Not the transformation itself, but its deferred (im)possibility, is traumatic.

[25] Temple keeps saying “you know…you know” about her story, eliciting agreement with her fantasy of the body transformed by mere thought, and when she finally refers directly to her magic penis, it is itself named as “you know.” (No direct reference—not “you know,” not even “down there”—is made to vaginas anywhere in the book.) Once we accede to this naming of the fantasized organ as what “you” (we) “know,” and as in fact the only thing we can know or acknowledge about sexual difference—and there is no way not to so accede, without closing the book and renouncing its reading right there—it is a penis. The penis has become not merely the token of sexual difference on the body, but the body itself, and the trauma of sexual difference as bar to transformation of that body, at once.

[26] This transformation, from representation of trauma to instrument and body of trauma, makes Temple’s lesbian phallus, and perhaps any lesbian phallus, subject to a Caruthian reading of trauma as “figured” on the body and in literature. Insofar as the lesbian phallus is a name for trauma, and insofar as the psychic structure of trauma (repetition and irresolution) is like the structure of academic literary criticism (endless rereading), the lesbian phallus is not an artificial or exterior concept to either Americanist literary study or to Freudian trauma, but in fact the principle of articulation between the two. American literature and the Freudian text meet at the crisis-points of representations of sexual difference.

[27] Moreover, in Sanctuary’s crisis, race is a necessary term. The traumatic bodily organ invented by Temple—her lesbian phallus construed as literal penis—is also “black.” Temple comes to a point in her story when Popeye, her white, but sartorially and spiritually “black” attacker, is actually in the room with her:

“And I’d lie there…and me jerking away in front of his hand and I’d think what I’d say to him, I’d talk to him like the teacher does in school, and then I was a teacher in school and it was a little black thing like a nigger boy, kind of, and I was the teacher. Because I’d say How old am I? and I’d say I’m forty-five years old. I had iron-gray hair and spectacles and I was all big up here like women get. I had on a gray tailored suit, and I never could wear gray. And I was telling it what I’d do, and it kind of drawing up and drawing up like it could already see the switch.”

Then I said That wont do. I ought to be a man. So I was an old man, with a long white beard, and then the little black man got littler and littler and I was saying Now. You see now. I’m a man now. Then I thought about being a man and as soon as I thought it, it happened. It made a kind of plopping sound, like blowing a little rubber tube wrong-side outward (219-220)

[28] The turn of events in Temple’s fantasy is difficult to follow. Confronted with her actual attacker, Temple responds not with violent resistance, but with further fantasizing, apparently an almost total withdrawal into her own mind. The fantasy of owning the penis seems to have been given up, and replaced with a fantasy of disciplining it, in the guise of a white, monstrously female (“all big up here”), teacher disciplining a black child, who is nonetheless referred to as “it” and who seems to be identical with the penis. Not only is the newly detached penis “like a nigger boy” but it “[draws] up,” becomes erect, under the threat of “the switch,” the repeated blows of corporal punishment. The sadistic-teacher fantasy is then itself replaced by the fantasy of being a white man threatening a “little black man,” and when the “little black man” diminishes (detumesces?) in the presence of the white man, Temple’s penis “happens.”

[29] Faulkner seems to be shoving the relationships among racial difference, sexual difference, and trauma into an obscene reality, as the elaborate myth of white patriarchal authority, which depends on the representation of traumatized, whipped black bodies, literally creates a white male phallus.  The lesbian phallus—the phallus that cannot be, that must fail to found meaning—is part of the novel’s reality, and becomes so through the sudden irruption of racial difference. Thus, the articulation of Freudian trauma with an American fictional theory of trauma is not merely a matter of fitting two complex analyses of sexuality together, but also entails the recognition of racial difference as an integral term of the analysis.

[30] Temple’s necessary failure, however, is largely recuperated to Faulkner’s naturalistic fictional universe. Psychotic, believing that she really has created herself a physically present penis, abjected and excited by pain, she seemingly failed to engineer any material change at all. According to her monologue, she passed out just at the point of the penis’s realization, and was thus unable to capitalize on her new status. She was also unable, therefore, to avoid actual rape, imprisonment in a Memphis brothel, and sexual involvement with a man chosen by Popeye (who, impotent, watches), that last instigated with an unclear degree of consent on Temple’s part but eventually pursued by her with a self-negating passion influential critics have characterized as “evil” (Brooks) or “nymphomaniac” (Tate).

[31] Having been unable to ward off violation by imaginative means, she spends much of the rest of the novel in an obscenely real, and escalating, state of constant sexual violation. Not only is the conventional, pulp-ish titillation of her sexual peril overwritten with the trauma of her rape, but it is re-effaced, as it were, as she comes to desire Popeye’s substitute, Red, and to desire to display her abjection, in a second, repetitively traumatic negation of the ‘innocent’ Temple. Her body, once it has been traversed by racial and sexual markers of difference, seems to have been sacrificed by the novel—killed and made taboo (see Bataille (43-53)), a holy Temple or an “evil” one, depending on your point of view, in and for the theoretical representation of trauma.

[32] Temple’s only possible escape from sexual trauma comes in the highly ambivalent, and evanescent, form of sexual exaltation with Red, which the narrator describes as itself a series of overpowering, grotesque, orgasmic traumas:

“He came toward her. She did not move. Her eyes began to grow darker and darker, lifting into her skull above a half moon of white, without focus, with the blank rigidity of a statue’s eyes. She began to say Ah-ah-ah-ah in an expiring voice, her body arching slowly backward as though faced by an exquisite torture. When he touched her she sprang like a bow, hurling herself upon him, her mouth gaped and ugly like that of a dying fish as she writhed her loins against him.” (238)

The very machinery of representation here seems to break down, as both Temple’s “figure”—her body, “rigid,” “expiring,” “writhing”—and figural language—the rapid-fire descriptions “a half moon,” “a statue’s eyes,” “as though faced by an exquisite torture,” “like a bow,” “like a dying fish”—seem to shake themselves to pieces in their wild, indiscriminate energy. Where Caruth’s “key figures” were supposed to “engender stories,” Temple as figure of trauma seems only to further distribute trauma to the reader.

[33] Moreover, the sacrifice of Temple comes to characterize the novel as a whole. When an innocent man is arrested for the initial rape, she testifies in a manner that is used against him, parroting words supplied by a corrupt lawyer with a total lack of affect, and apparently heavily drugged, “her eyes blank and all pupil above the three savage spots of rouge” (289). The innocent man, Goodwin—also white, also ironically named—is therefore sacrificed too, both metaphorically and literally, by being burned alive in a lynching. This lynching, in its conventional association with violence against African-Americans (and especially with the slanderous attribution to black men of sexual brutality against white women) duplicates the ‘blackening’ that characterized Temple’s assumption of her lesbian phallus. It seems, therefore, that the mark of racial difference, though essential to Faulkner’s interrogation of sexual difference, is also the harbinger of a theoretical collapse into the mystifications of a sacrifice. Blackened persons are to be sacrificed; the conventional connections between racial difference, sexual difference, and trauma—between racist discourses of racial difference, misogynist discourses of sexual difference, and instances of socially mandated extreme violence—are thus maintained in the dénouement.

[34] There is a particularly obscene irony—indeed, a traumatic irony for the critic insofar as its figure returns and returns, defying interpretive labor—in the fact that when Temple is first raped, it is with an object, an artificial penis. The object, a corncob, is later the main exhibit, waved around with histrionic drama, at trial: “[The prosecutor] held in his hand a corn-cob. It appeared to have been dipped in dark brownish paint” (283). This corncob is darkened with her blood, and thus literally hers, literally created as part of her body at the same moment as it violates it, and at the same moment at which it is darkened, replacing her vagina even as the latter is both penetrated and wounded. That which is used to rape Temple can only be called a phallus.

[35] In its literality it is potentially also the cause of traumatic theorization. Temple may have fantasized/theorized after the fact of her rape with an object, for while the stages of creating her blackened lesbian phallus are revealed out of order, parodying conventional whodunits—first Temple’s meeting with the bootleggers, then her monologue, and finally, at trial, the corncob—in terms of the novel’s chronology, she narrates her magic penis well after her rape. The body, Temple’s body, would therefore emerge as the original site of theorization of sexual and racial difference, but also as indissociable from the abjecting, violent return of a radically incomprehensible trauma. Florence Dore describes the implications of such trauma in and by representations succinctly: “[I]n Sanctuary there is an idea that the novel reproduces aspects of its own social world, but there is also a thwarting worry that the novel’s own successful representation will spell that social world’s disaster. Faulkner depicts representation as a threat to that which nonetheless compels it” (80). Representation’s threat even endangers author-ity as such; Ernest Hemingway, for instance, once referred to Faulkner derisively as “Corncob” (Karl 771).

The end of the phallus?

[36] Thus, the lesbian phallus is a necessary reading of, in, and for the articulation of racial and sexual difference in American literature’s scenes of trauma. But what I have been calling Temple’s “sacrifice,” her loss of speech, loss of power to represent herself, loss of control over her body—a loss that seems to be enforced, even approved, by her brief, creative speaking of and through a lesbian phallus—need not be taken as the end of the analysis. Though lesbian-phallic women are both doomed and exalted, we need not understand the lesbian phallus as an internal limit to trauma’s capacity to theorize the intersections of racial and sexual difference. The thing one has to remember about the lesbian phallus is that it is a phallus and “perhaps the promise of the phallus is always dissatisfying in some way” (Butler 57). Moreover, Butler’s critical task was never to make it work, but to “acknowledge that failure from the start and to work that failure for its uses and to suggest that something more useful than the phallic ideal may come of the analysis” (ibid).

[37] “Phallus,” she points out, never quite escapes from “penis,” insofar as it remains an unlocatable quantity without the bodily example, yet pretends, in Lacanian theory at least, to precede and control the signifiable, including signifiable bodies (76-8). Butler associates this problem of the penis/phallus with Lacan’s essay on the Mirror Stage, arguing that the infant’s triumphant mistake of resolving the disunity of his incomprehensible body by assuming his image as himself, follows the logic of postulating the phallus, which is in a sense only the reflection of a penis. And indeed, Temple has made this mistake, recognizing and reassembling herself in a spectacular phallus that can only fail her in the end.

[38] Butler does not remain with the mirror stage, however; in order to follow out the implications of the phallus as founder of signification, she turns to “Signification of the Phallus,” a later essay of Lacan’s in which literal bodies, unlike in “Mirror Stage,” are not only not present but forcefully, repeatedly declared out of bounds. “The phallus,” it is essential to understand, “is a signifier” (Lacan 285), and moreover a privileged signifier, the one without which we would not have all else. There is a struggle between the penis and the phallus, insofar as “the phallus not only opposes the penis in a logical sense, but is itself instituted through the repudiation of its partial, decentered, and substitutable character” (Butler 84).

[39] The phallus, in other words, is analogous to the (implicitly racist) anthropological myth of the cannibal sons in Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1911), who instituted their own power through the murder and repudiation of their obscenely all-powerful father, who ate his flesh to consolidate their bond, and who vowed, out of guilt, never to become him, never to substitute themselves for him, even as they maintained their kinship with his image. Lacan’s insistence on the non-bodily nature of the phallus recirculates, not only the trauma of sexual difference, but also a myth of original trauma. This means that any phallus, including a lesbian phallus, has a necessary, rather than an incidental connection to such a myth. Temple’s “brownish” corncob is a displaced, lesbian phallus because of its ability to disappear and reappear with respect to sexual difference, but its displacing,traumatic effects on both the non-lesbian phallus, and on psychoanalytic accounts of trauma, is due to its implication in a foundational myth of traumatic violence.

[40] In line with the larger project of her book, Butler specifically designates sexual difference, and the sexed bodies located around the division, as the critical bailiwick of the lesbian phallus: “[it] is important to underscore…the way in which the stability of both “masculine” and “feminine” morphologies is called into question by a lesbian resignification of the phallus which depends on the crossings of phantasmatic identification…the relation to the phallus is constitutive” (87). But in her wrapping-up of a theorization half-jokingly introduced as unrealizable (“After such a promising title, I knew that I could not possibly offer a satisfying essay…” (57)) she touches, perhaps unwittingly, on a metaphor of racial difference that is axiomatic, even cliché, in African-Americanist criticism.

But if the truth is, as Nietzsche suggests, only a series of mistakes configured in relation to one another or, in Lacanian terms, a set of constituting méconaissances, then the phallus is but one signifier among others in the course of lesbian exchange, neither the originating signifier nor the unspeakable outside. The phallus will thus always operate as both veil and confession, a deflection from an erotogenicity that includes and exceeds the phallus, an exposure of a desire which attests to a morphological transgression and, hence, to the instability of the imaginary boundaries of sex. (87-8)

[41] Did you catch it? The metaphor is “veil,” and, cast as a kind of confession, this veil is the “key figure” in Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk: “After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world” (10). Du Bois’s direct reference is to a caul, a piece of translucent tissue sometimes covering the face of an infant as it is born, and superstitiously supposed to confer the second sight. It is no airy ideal veil, but a piece of flesh, the mother’s flesh.

[42] In other words, a peculiar inheritance of both blindness as insight, a wound that both prevents and enables representation, is the signal characteristic of African-American culture and identity. As Christina Zwarg writes, Du Bois “persists in framing the psychological issue of trauma as…a social situation, one that is deeply cultural and relational in its conception” (11), and therefore his metaphor is highly appropriate as a means of articulating Butler’s lesbian phallus as representation of trauma with racial difference as trauma in/of American literature. There are literary resonances as well; the Du Boisian imagery of excessive organs, false or incomplete self-knowledge, strange exposure and magical transgression is uncannily consonant with Butler’s description of the ambiguous status of the phallus with regard to sexual difference.

[43] Temple’s corncob seems to me to operate as veil under both these critical systems, and thus the consonance of psychoanalytic accounts of trauma and sexuality, with American literary modes of describing racial difference and sexual trauma, is less an insight I offer than a repetition that I am trying to understand.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Charles Shepherdson, Branka Arsic, Ron Bosco, and especially Dina Al-Kassim, for generous comments on earlier versions of this essay.

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