Trauma Tales

Trauma studies and trauma theory have been integrated into fields other than psychology. “Trauma,” Alexiana Fry writes in her academic monograph, Trauma Talks in the Hebrew Bible: Speech Act Theory and Trauma Hermeneutics, “moves between the individual and communal, silent and spoken, and private and political. Trauma’s very nature is as messy as we perceive it to be, never remaining in one categorization, and yet always remaining in all of them.”

OK, this is an expensive academic book. I’m grateful to the publisher for a review copy. If you buy this book, I get an Associates fee from Amazon.

Trauma, in other words, penetrates cultures systemically. “Healing trauma when it pertains to systemic issues does not mean simply equipping marginalized people groups with tools to cope; it means changing and upending the systems that harm them in the first place.” Thus, if we perceive the impact of poverty upon a family as trauma, food stamps does not solve the issue. In many cases, poverty is multigenerational.

Fry mentions trauma in the following: “the coronavirus pandemic, Russia continues to wage war against Ukraine, Iranians are being murdered for protesting an authoritarian religious regime, women's bodies in the United states continue to be considered as property (similarly through an authoritarian religious regime) through Dobbs, guns are everywhere, and the current climate disasters are growing.” Trauma flows from a vast array of causes. Trauma surrounds us.

Fry combines trauma theory with speech act theory (locutionary, illocutionary, perlocutionary of JL Austin) to examine some Old Testament/Hebrew Bible texts as “texts of trauma.” She writes,

Trauma does quite a bit, almost part and parcel of its defiance of firm definition; once more, it flexes and flows in whichever direction it feels it must. While many words in general can be said to be fluid based on context, the very way the word trauma currently operates in the world is potentially too fluid for some to get behind.”

In other words, and she does not say this, for some, If everything is trauma nothing is. Yet this is an easy escape and must be avoided. Her contention, based on sophisticated trauma studies, is that the goal is not to get beyond trauma but to go through trauma. Including the trauma of others. Without colonizing their trauma as our own. Empathy is required, but even the empathic never enter into the trauma of the truly traumatized.

At the heart of her project is what she calls an “in-between hermeneutic.” Fleshing out what she means by this in later chapters is the only way to comprehend this kind of hermeneutic. But she warns the traditional Bible reader with this:

Trauma gets in-between our neat notions of critical lenses, even creating new ways to view how speech moves between bodies, these words doing potentially different things.” Thickness obtains and is realized, and her method leads to “a movement through the middle of the thick.

She has a very helpful graph on p. 16, and I describe it. It’s a bit fuzzy for these old eyes.

In the middle is a “window of tolerance.” To the left and right of it is “dysregulation” and to the far left is “freeze, fawn, and flop” while to the extreme right is “fight and flight.” Dysregulation is a liminal space of discomfort. Tolerance is the common experience of an event in a way that the person copes.

Where Fry goes I have not gone, at least as far as I know: trauma novels. I hope to find a list of trauma novels. But this is what Juliana Claasens wrote: “trauma victims need trauma narratives in order to become trauma survivors.” Narratives and fiction therefore have the capacity to help trauma survivors heal or at least cope. But Fry Is not so confident we need to be using the word healing. She likes the term “re-making.” As in, working out our own narrative. Many victims of trauma and those who are experiencing trauma narrate their way through their experiences.

She uses speech act theory to analyze both novels as well as biblical texts. This allows her to see not only what is written, but the force of what is written, as well as the impact of what is written. That, I think, describes speech act theory in a simple form. Correct me if I'm wrong.

She turns to empathy theories and to a historian by the name of Thomas Kohut, who argues that empathy and imagination are required if one wants to identify with victims in a text. Historians classically have developed a theory of disinterestedness, or dissociation, in order to be objective about the past. Objectivity is impossible. Empathy, in other words may always be at work. Fry Contends we need empathy in order to understand and go through trauma in these narratives. She constantly reminds us not to colonize the experience of others.

She turns to “aesthetic wit(h)nessing,” which is “a means of being with and remembering for the other through an artistic act and aesthetic encounter.”  She quotes Bracha Ettinger here. The expression suggests more than one might think. “And this is the ethic in the very terminology of moving through – witnessing to truly wit(h)nessing.” Again, suggestive.

In the margin in my book, I wrote that when we focus on the person we have a survivor centric hermeneutic, and when we focus on the pain we have a trauma centric hermeneutic. If Alexiana Fry reads this, I wonder what she thinks of this posing of frames.