1. 1
“I have been so dislanguaged by what happened”: The Possibility of Traumatic Poetics
Jamie Flathers (author name)
Department of English, Washington State University
ENGL 101: College Composition
Jamie Flathers, MFA
9/20/20
2. 2
Abstract
200-word summary of your essay. Single paragraph, no indentations.
Keywords: writing process, writer’s block, improvement
3. 3
“I have been so dislanguaged by what happened”: The Possibility of Traumatic Poetics
In my (admittedly limited) experience, the literature of trauma seems to orbit around a
central crisis of representation. What, exactly, is being represented, and how? Who, if anyone, is
responsible for this representation? The critic Anne Whitehead may have put it best: “[I]f trauma
comprises an event or experience which overwhelms the individual and resists language or
representation, how then can it be narrativised in fiction?” (3). This crisis of language, and of
representation, seems to inform every aspect of the study of trauma, as a socio-cultural, medico-
legal and literary concern, and rightly so. In order to understand another’s traumatic experience,
it must first be articulated, and in order for that to happen, a form of communication must be
devised. The critics I’ve read have so far engaged in discussions about several different modes of
communication: literary fiction, playwrighting, photography (as well as multimodal art forms),
personal testimony, memoir, and film. While these discussions are important, incisive, and
thoughtful, I can’t help but be struck by the conspicuous absence of poetry in the consideration
of possible modes of communication. Why is that? Surely other critics and students of criticism
have considered this matter, but I contend that poetry ought to be part of the conversation, and
I’d like to use David Ferry’s “That Now Are Wild and Do Not Remember” as a test case. I
believe this poem typifies three elements of the traumatic aesthetic articulated by Whitehead and
others: the crisis of language, a disruption of linear temporality, and, in an interesting way, Anne
Whitehead’s ideas about memory spaces and sites of trauma.
Writing Process Articulation
From its first line, Ferry’s poem presents the reader with a crisis not only of language but
of knowledge: “Where did you go, when you went away?” (1). The speaker, and therefore the
reader, lacks a fundamental understanding, and this uncertainty, which pervades the entire poem,
catalyzes the speaker’s inability to articulate an experience. His statement of this problem is
4. 4
quite overt: “I have been so dislanguaged by what happened/I cannot speak the words that
somewhere you/Maybe were speaking to others where you went” (9-11). The problem of
speaking is bound up in the problem of knowing: we don’t know where “you” went, but s/he is
central to the speaker’s break with language—it is the words s/he might be speaking that the
speaker is unable to utter. This lack is so severe that the speaker has had to invent a new word for
it. Being dislanguaged, itself a traumatic experience, perfectly underscores Whitehead’s assertion
that traumatic experience “resists language or representation” (3). Dislanguagement, then, leads,
somewhat paradoxically, to repetition, the speaker fixating on both the opening uncertainty and
its attendant crisis of language. He does not know where “you” has gone, and so repeats the
words “elsewhere” and “somewhere” several times throughout the poem: “It is as if you step by
step were going/Someplace elsewhere into some other range” (2-3); “Into the wilderness there
elsewhere in the bed/Elsewhere somewhere in the house beyond my seeking” (7-8). He also
repeats the word “speaking,” referring to “some other range/Of speaking, that I had no gift for
speaking,/Knowing nothing of the language of that place” (3-5). This kind of repetition,
according to Whitehead, mimics traumatic behavior, and is used by many writers of trauma
narratives in order to “[suggest] the insistent return of the event and the disruption of narrative
chronology or progression” (86). Moreover, it illustrates the final failure of language in the face
of trauma. Because the speaker cannot fully articulate this event, he is unable to move on from it.
Writing Process Refinement
Although this is a lyric poem, not necessarily bound by the conventions of narration, it
nevertheless occurs to me that Ferry’s simultaneous expressions of dislanguagement and
repetition also present the reader with a kind of narrative dysfunction, which places the poem
still more firmly within the realm of the aesthetics of the literature of trauma. In his reading of
5. 5
Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a seminal work of trauma fiction, the critic Roger Luckhurst notes a
prevailing “disarticulation of linear narrative,” a device which creates, to use Dominick
LaCapra’s phrase, “empathic unsettlement” (91). The characters in Beloved often circle around
the articulation of a traumatic event without ever quite managing to narrate it, such that they are
“circling what they are defined by and cannot confront, unable to communicate their story”
(Luckhurst 91). The reader, then, has a great deal of difficulty in creating a narrative sequence,
and the necessary revealing of the traumatic event is delayed. Like Morrison’s characters,
Ferry’s speaker is more or less unmoored in narrative time, circling the traumatic event through
the repetition of words but never actually telling the reader what happened. He makes one
oblique attempt to explain in the final lines of the poem: “Maybe they talk together where they
are/Restlessly wandering, along the shore,/Waiting for a way to cross the river” (12-14). While
his use of the word “river” could imply many things—perhaps it’s merely a generic marker-out
of borders, or perhaps the river Styx, or the river Lethe—what seems unavoidable is that the
“you” has gone away from the speaker, and the river, metaphorical or not, coupled with the
notion that the “you” must wait to cross it, denotes a more or less permanent goneness. Certainty
of goneness aside, the reader does not fully understand what happened, nor does she know how
long ago it happened. Ferry’s speaker is necessarily attempting to access a past event, but the
reader has no way of knowing how much time has elapsed, which creates a feeling of timeless
despair—without a sense of time, how can it be said that this trauma has an end (or, for that
matter, a beginning)? Ferry has demonstrated, in a sonnet-length poem, the same kind of
resistance to closure that trauma fiction so often does. This short, lyric poem is, like Beloved, “a
testament to the immemorial” (Luckhurst, 2008, pp. 95-96).
6. 6
Finally, this poem creates, through its repetition and narrative timelessness, a crisis of
place. Whitehead contends that one of the effects of trauma on survivors, especially Holocaust
survivors, is a destruction of their sense of place. She cites Geoffrey Hartman in the service of
this argument: “Hartman unequivocally states, ‘An organic relation to place is what I lacked and
would never recover’” (10). She goes on to say that “burdened with the non-experience of
trauma, the camps act as sites of stasis and form non-places in the minds of survivors. Although
memory is strongly attached to place, the effect of trauma, it seems, has been to destroy the
symbolic function of place” (10). Ferry’s speaker seems to have a similar trouble. He cannot
attach a place to the trauma, and so repeats compulsively the words “elsewhere” and
“somewhere,” often in conjunction. The poem is almost completely devoid of typical descriptors
of place, although the speaker does offer the reader “house” (8), “wilderness” and “bed” (7) and
finally “river” (14), anchoring somewhat the notion of place, but in an almost desperately generic
way. The best the speaker can manage is a pointing without a naming: “that place/To which you
went with naked foot at night” (5-6); “somewhere you/Maybe were speaking to others where you
went” (10-11); “Maybe they talk together where they are” (12). The speaker is unattached not
only to time and to language, but to place—he knows there is one (“where you went”; “where
they are”), but he cannot describe it, and it therefore has no power, no symbolic function, as
Whitehead would have it. Obsessed with the place to which “you” has gone, a place that can
neither be named nor described, the speaker is left without a place of his own: there is nowhere
for him to be, nowhere for him to heal. There is only a series of not-places, or, perhaps more
precisely, almost-places.
All of these crises—language, knowledge, time, and place—point to a niche for poetry in
the realm of the traumatic aesthetic. I certainly don’t mean to suggest that poetry ought to be
7. 7
privileged as a mode of communicating traumatic experience, or that it is quote-unquote better
than any other form. It is clearly capable, however, of being a vessel for traumatic experience,
and a flexible one at that. Poetry, with its density and urgency, its tendencies toward
experimental language and form, seems to me to be at least as good a vehicle for trauma as any
other, and I believe Ferry’s poem bears that out. It clearly conforms to many elements of the
traumatic aesthetic articulated by trauma theorists, even going so far as to invent a new word for
the essential paradox of trauma—survivors have been dislanguaged, but they are compelled,
somehow, to speak anyway.
8. 8
References
Ferry, David. “That Now Are Wild And Do Not Remember.” Bewilderment: New Poems and
Translations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. 101. Print.
Luckhurst, R. (2008). The Trauma Question. New York: Routledge.
Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004.
Brand, A. G. (1985). Hot cognition: Emotions and writing behavior. Journal of
Advanced Composition, 6, 5-15. http://www.jstor.com/stable/20865583
