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Trauma, Ethics, and the Body at War in Brittain, Borden and Bagnold
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ( IF 0.3 ) Pub Date : 2019-03-04 , DOI: 10.7771/1481-4374.3364
Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo

In her article “Trauma, Ethics, and the Body at War in Brittain, Borden and Bagnold,” Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo discusses how the autobiographical accounts of the conflict by Vera Brittain, Enid Bagnold and Mary Borden, inspired by their experiences as voluntary nurses in the front, deconstruct the meanings of femininity, masculinity and patriotism, contesting the official rhetoric of passivity that defined the role of women in World War I. Their extreme engagement with the precariousness and vulnerability of others elicits an empathic response that can be interpreted through Judith Butler (2004; 2009), Emmanuel Lévinas (1969) and Alan Badiou’s (1993) ethics of alterity. Against the abstract assumptions of honor and heroism in many male war accounts, these women’s face-to-face encounter with the suffering bodies impels them to an intersubjective relation defined by sensibility and affectivity. Their exposure to the limits of (in)humanity implies a drive towards commonality that cannot be overlooked and suggests a gendered intervention in the body politic in which the war/peace, front/home binaries are necessarily redefined. Their texts are also “bodies in transit” inasmuch as they move between Victorian conventional order and a sense of Modernist fragmentariness evoking the distorted anatomies of the combatants they nursed and signalling a clear interaction between war, gender and experimental writing. Re-visiting Brittain, Bagnold and Borden from the critical perspectives of the Ethical Turn and Trauma Studies is essential for a reconceptualization of war and of the intricacies of its representation. Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo, "Trauma, Ethics, and the Body at War in Brittain, Borden and Bagnold" page 2 of 10 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 21.1 (2019): Special Issue Gendered Bodies in Transit: Between Vulnerability and Resistance. Ed. Manuela Coppola and Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz Carolina SANCHEZ-PALENCIA CARAZO Trauma, Ethics, and the Body at War in Brittain, Borden and Bagnold In his collection of twenty-two short stories about the Vietnam war, The Things They Carried (1990), Tim O’Brien devotes episode seven, “How to tell a true war story,” to meditation on the complex relationship between war experience and storytelling, and concludes that, just as war distorts the soldiers’ perception, its representation is equally puzzling for both authors and readers, confronted with a devastating reality that generates incongruous interpretations: “And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed” (67-68). In a similar vein, Elaine Scarry attributes the difficulties inherent to war accounts to pain’s inexpressibility which generates a discursive crisis and reveals an important dilemma: “Either it remains inarticulate or else the moment it first becomes articulate it silences all else: the moment language bodies forth the reality of pain, it makes all further statements and interpretations seem ludicrous and inappropriate” (60). As trauma theorists argue, every attempt at representing the incontestable reality of the body in pain results in trivializations and falsifications, and yet there exists the primary impulse to give testimony to the traumatic experience (Caruth, Trauma 1995). One of the most frequent aspects in war narratives is their common vindication of the authenticity of the account, one that would distinguish the chronicle of first-hand observers from the false representations of the event where “[w]ar itself is left in the distance” (Scarry 2). The claim of authenticity, of a testimony’s ability to provide direct access to the Real (in its absence), is, in fact, an appeal to moral and political authority. And, in spite of all the different attempts at “the disappearance of the human body from accounts of the very event that is the most radically embodying event in which human beings ever collectively participate” (Scarry 71), the injured human body re-emerges overwhelmingly in the writings of Vera Brittain (Testament of Youth, 1933), Mary Borden (Forbidden Zone, 1929) and Enid Bagnold (A Diary without Dates, 1918) for whom it is not an abstraction nor a reality that can be evacuated from the text because it anchors the ethical dimension of their war narratives. As voluntary nurses serving in France, England and Malta during the First World War they experienced a full exposure to the carnage that they recalled in their memoirs, although their testimonies have only recently drawn critical attention. Even as war resists representation, representation is imperative, because, Kate McLaughlin states, it serves to impose narrative order on its chaos and render the experience comprehensible (7); but McLaughlin’s explanation seems to oversimplify the question if one reads Borden’s disturbing introduction to The Forbidden Zone (1929), the war memoirs written by this wealthy American author who funded and managed her own field hospital: To those who find these impressions confused, I would say that they are fragments of a great confusion. Any attempt to reduce them to order would require artifice on my part and would falsify them. To those, on the other hand, who find them unbearably plain, I would say that I have blurred the bare horror of facts and softened the reality in spite of myself, not because I wished to do so, but because I was incapable of a nearer approach to the truth. (3) Both O’Brien’s and Borden’s unsettling statements suggest that “representation of war is essentially anxiogenic” in that it refuses depiction although “conflict demands it” (McLaughlin 6). In this regard, authors have to undergo a process of language re-construction so as try to narrow (but never completely eliminate) the gap between the experience and the representation of conflict, and to overcome the limitations caused by physical suffering. “Physical pain,” Scarry argues, “does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned” (4). The texts analyzed in this work contain explicit accounts of the moans and cries of the wounded exemplifying the inarticulate prelanguage of pain. Unable to find the meaning behind the monosyllabic utterances of these men who have gone speechless by unbearable suffering, their authors can only reproduce them, thus reinforcing the emotional intensity of their testimonies. Unrepresentability can be thus manifested in different ways but they are all produced by confrontation with extremity and incommensurability, by the individual’s encounter with the unfamiliar, the abnormal and intractable. And in matters of scale and technology, the First World War (1914-1918) was, to a great extent, a new unprecedented kind of war and constituted an experience that cannot be measured by any human standards. Never before had a conflict involved so many different nations from Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo, "Trauma, Ethics, and the Body at War in Brittain, Borden and Bagnold" page 3 of 10 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 21.1 (2019): Special Issue Gendered Bodies in Transit: Between Vulnerability and Resistance. Ed. Manuela Coppola and Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz all over the world and introduced so many new technologies of combat. The Great War inaugurated aerial and chemical warfare with the development of new military technology such as flame throwers, explosive shells, mustard gas, tanks, fighter planes and zeppelins which resulted in an unprecedentedly high casualty rate and extraordinary physical and psychological trauma. The first modern world-scale conflict thus opened up an entirely new dimension of suffering to both victims and witnesses. Just as Theodor Adorno’s mystified dictum about the barbarity of writing poetry after Auschwitz denounces the failure of style when the individual is brutally confronted with the formlessness of pain and suffering (34), Brittain also thinks about the futility of poetry after war experience: We never dreamed that, in the years of renewed sensitiveness after the War, the convenient shutter would simply refuse to operate, or even to allow us to romanticise –as I who tried to write poetry romanticised in 1917—the everlasting dirt and gruesome. (384) There is a long tradition of narrative fictions about war that should be acknowledged, but those about the First World War do not comfortably fit within it, since “they effect a rearticulation of that tradition, and eventually set in motion a radical disjuncture with it” (Knibb 10). The inadequacy of previous models is a common trait in many of these World War I accounts and aggravates the authorial anxiety of writers like Brittain, Borden and Bagnold who, despite their direct involvement in the conflict, feel severely alienated from war culture and literature. In At the Violet Hour, Sarah Cole relates this representational crisis to the Modernist aesthetic to which many of the war writers ascribed themselves. She states that Modernism’s “indeterminacy” is in fact a reaction to “the extremity of visible violence” (30), which results in elaborate aesthetic forms to both restrain and display different modes of violence and illustrate these distinctive stylistics with the authors’ use of rhetorical strategies like allegory, analogy, and substitution. Cole conceives of violence as a model for what we cannot deal with, and this could explain how a whole set of artists –from Pablo Picasso to Samuel Beckett—developed an aesthetics of failure and impossibility, but at the same time she aligns herself with the prevalent association between trauma and the unrepresentable, arguing that violence also elicits creativity, aesthetic

中文翻译:

英国,博登和巴格诺德的创伤,伦理和战争中的身体

卡罗莱纳州Sánchez-PalenciaCarazo在她的文章“英国,博登和巴格诺的创伤,伦理和战争中的身体”中,讨论了维拉·布里坦,伊妮德·巴格诺德和玛丽·博登对冲突的自传叙述,该灵感来自于他们的自愿经历前线护士解构了女性气质,阳刚之气和爱国主义的涵义,与定义一战中女性角色的官方消极言论相抗衡。她们对他人engagement可危和脆弱性的极端参与引起了共鸣,这可以解释为通过朱迪思·巴特勒(2004; 2009),伊曼纽尔·列维纳斯(1969)和艾伦·巴迪欧(1993)的变更伦理。反对许多男性战争言论中关于荣誉和英雄主义的抽象假设,这些妇女与受难者的面对面的交流促使她们处于由情感和情感定义的主体间关系。他们暴露于(人类)极限的情况意味着对共同性的追求是不容忽视的,并暗示着对政治政治的性别干预,在其中必须重新定义战争/和平,前线/家庭二进制。他们的文字也是“运输中的尸体”,因为它们在维多利亚时代的传统秩序和现代主义的碎片意识之间移动,唤起了他们所护理的战斗人员的解剖结构的扭曲,并标志着战争,性别和实验性写作之间的清晰互动。重新访问英国,从伦理转向和创伤研究的批判角度看,巴格诺德和博登对战争及其代表的复杂性的重新概念化至关重要。卡罗莱纳州Sánchez-PalenciaCarazo,“创伤,伦理和英国,博登和巴格诺德战争中的尸体”第10页,共2页CLCWeb:比较文学和文化21.1(2019):过境性别问题特刊:脆弱性与抵抗力之间。埃德 Manuela Coppola和Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz卡罗莱纳州SANCHEZ-PALENCIA CARAZO创伤,道德和不列颠,博登和巴格诺德的战争遗体在他收集的关于越南战争的22篇短篇小说中,《随身携带的东西》(1990年),蒂姆奥布赖恩(O'Brien)将第七集“如何讲出真实的战争故事”专门用于思考战争经验与讲故事之间的复杂关系,并得出结论,就像战争扭曲了士兵的看法一样,这对于两位作者来说都是令人困惑的和读者面对的灾难性现实会产生不一致的解释:“然后,当您讲述这件事时,总会有那种超现实的表象,这使故事看起来是不真实的,但这实际上代表了看起来似乎是坚硬而确切的真理”(67-68)。同样,伊莱恩·斯卡瑞(Elaine Scarry)将战争固有的困难归因于痛苦的无法表达,这造成了话语危机并暴露出一个重要的困境:“要么保持言语不清,要么就在它变得清晰时就使所有其他一切都保持沉默:从痛苦的现实出发,它使得所有进一步的陈述和解释都显得荒谬而不合适”(60)。正如创伤理论家所论证的那样,每一次试图在疼痛中代表身体无可争议的现实的尝试都会导致琐事化和虚假化,然而,存在着为创伤经历作证的主要冲动(Caruth,Trauma 1995)。战争叙事中最常见的方面之一是他们对账目真实性的共同辩护,这将使第一手观察者的纪事与错误的陈述相区别,在事件的虚假陈述中,“战争本身就留在了远方”。 ”(惊吓2)。真实性的要求是,证人有能力直接进入真实(在没有真实存在的情况下),实际上是对道德和政治权威的呼吁。而且,尽管人们做出了各种不同的尝试,“从对人类集体参与的最根本的体现这一事件的描述中,人体消失”(Scarry 71),受伤的人体还是重新出现了。维拉·布里顿(Vera Brittain)(青年遗嘱,1933年),玛丽·博登(Mary Borden)(禁区,1929年)和伊妮德·巴格诺德(Enid Bagnold)(《无日期的日记》,1918年),因为文本锚定了他们战争叙事的伦理维度,所以从文本中可以撤消的不是抽象概念还是现实。第一次世界大战期间,作为志愿护士在法国,英国和马耳他服务,他们经历了回忆录中提到的屠杀事件,尽管他们的证词直到最近才引起人们的广泛关注。即使战争抵制代表制,代表制也势在必行,因为凯特·麦克劳克林(Kate McLaughlin)指出,它的作用是将叙事秩序强加于混乱之中,并使经验变得可理解(7)。但是如果有人读博登(Borden)令人不安的《禁区》(The Forbidden Zone)(1929年)简介,麦克劳克林的解释似乎简化了这个问题,这本由美国富人资助并管理自己的野战医院的战争回忆录:对于那些觉得这些印象感到困惑的人,我想说它们是一个巨大困惑的片段。任何试图降低它们秩序的尝试都将需要我的帮助,并会伪造它们。另一方面,对于那些发现它们简直难以忍受的人,我想说的是尽管我自己,但我还是模糊了事实的恐怖并软化了现实,这并不是因为我希望这样做,而是因为我没有能力更接近真理。(3)奥布莱恩和博登的令人不安的说法都表明,“战争的表示本质上是焦虑的”,因为尽管“冲突需要它”,但它拒绝描绘(McLaughlin 6)。在这方面,作者必须经历语言重构的过程,以试图缩小(但绝不能完全消除)体验与冲突表现之间的差距,并克服身体遭受的痛苦。斯卡里认为:“身体上的痛苦不仅抵制语言,而且还积极地破坏语言,使人们立即恢复到语言之前的状态,恢复到人们在学习语言之前发出的声音和哭泣”(4)。在这项工作中分析的文本包含对伤者的mo吟声和哭声的明确说明,例示了口齿不清的疼痛预言。这些人由于无法忍受的痛苦而无言以对,但他们的作者无法找到单音节发音背后的含义,他们的作者只能复制它们,从而增强了证词的情感强度。不可代表性可以用不同的方式表现出来,但它们都是由于面对极端和不可通约性而产生的,通过个人与陌生人的相遇,异常和顽固。在规模和技术方面,第一次世界大战(1914-1918)在很大程度上是一种新的史无前例的战争,是一种无法用任何人类标准衡量的经验。从未有过如此多的国家与冲突发生冲突,来自卡罗来纳州Sánchez-PalenciaCarazo,“创伤,伦理和英国,博登和巴格诺德的战争中的遗体” 10 CLCWeb第3页:比较文学与文化21.1(2019):过境性别问题特刊:脆弱性与抵抗力之间。埃德 Manuela Coppola和Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz遍布世界各地,并介绍了许多新的战斗技术。第一次世界大战引发了空战和化学战,其中包括火焰喷射器,炸药弹,芥子气,坦克,战斗机和齐柏林飞艇等新军事技术的发展,造成了空前的高伤亡率以及极大的身心创伤。因此,第一次现代世界范围的冲突为受害者和证人开辟了一个全新的苦难层面。就像西奥多·阿多诺(Theodor Adorno)关于奥斯威辛集中营后诗歌写作的野蛮化的神秘格言一样,当人们残酷地面对痛苦和痛苦的无形化时,他谴责了风格的失败(34),英国人还考虑了战后诗歌的无用性:我们从来没有梦想过,在战后重新敏感的岁月中,方便的百叶窗只会拒绝操作,甚至不允许我们浪漫化-就像我试图写的那样1917年,诗歌浪漫化了–永恒的污垢和恐怖。(384)关于战争的叙事小说有着悠久的传统,应该被承认,但是关于第一次世界大战的叙事小说却不能令人满意地融入其中,因为“它们影响了这一传统,并最终导致了激进的分裂。 ”(Knibb 10)。先前模型的不足是这些第一次世界大战中许多叙述的共同特征,并加剧了诸如Brittain,Borden和Bagnold之类的作家的创作焦虑,尽管他们直接参与了冲突,感到与战争文化和文学格格不入。莎拉·科尔(Sarah Cole)在《紫罗兰时光》中将这种代表性危机与许多战争作家归因于其的现代主义美学联系起来。她指出,现代主义的“不确定性”实际上是对“可见暴力的极端性”的一种反应(30),其形成了精致的美学形式,既可以抑制和展示不同的暴力模式,又可以通过作者的使用来说明这些独特的风格。寓言策略,例如寓言,类比和替代。科尔认为暴力是我们无法应对的榜样,这可以解释从帕勃罗·毕加索(Pablo Picasso)到塞缪尔·贝克特(Samuel Beckett)的整个艺术家如何发展了失败和不可能的美学,
更新日期:2019-03-04
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