“Something was set between the words and the world”: Trauma and Testimony in the Poetry of World War II

Abstract

Research in trauma theory in literature has gained prominence in the last couple of decades, especially since 1996, with the publication of Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience and Tal’s Worlds of Hurt. Trauma studies, however, had already been advanced in the late 1890s in psychiatry by Freud, who devoted much of his later career to figuring out how the human mind responds to traumatic experiences. His view of trauma as a “wound inflicted upon the mind” helps to account for the fragmentation of the self evident in the poetry of World War II. Because war poetry tends to be dominated by intimate accounts of personal experiences and feelings, Felman and Laub’s claim that victims feel compelled to offer their testimony in order to process the traumatic event is taken as the basis for the analysis. While most critical works on trauma and testimony in literature, however, focus on texts where the traumatic event is told in retrospect, this dissertation explores the representation of the traumatic event at the precise moment of its first occurrence. By analysing the responses of several poets to their experiences during the war, this paper aims at understanding how they try to make sense of the traumatic event through the written word. To this end, the poets selected all served in the frontline either as soldiers, doctors or pilots. The testimonies of those who suffered through the conflict prove some of the best historical evidence we have to this day to help us comprehend how the traumatic event affects victims psychologically. The poets’ personal, unique responses to the war eventually collide with a common, relentless commitment to tell their stories, and the use of similar coping mechanisms. As a result, I argue that poetry is the literary genre most suited to illustrating the impact of the traumatic event.