An Interview With Hartman

8/6/2019 An Interview With Hartman

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An Interview with Geoffrey HartmanAuthor(s): Cathy Caruth and Geoffrey HartmanSource: Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 35, No. 4, Essays in Honor of Geoffrey H. Hartman(Winter, 1996), pp. 630-652Published by: Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25601201 .

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630There was a Boy: ye knew him weU, ye cliffsAnd islands ofWinander!?many a time

At evening, when the starsbeganTo move along the edges of the hiUs,Rising or setting,would he stand aloneBeneath the trees or by the gUmmering lake,And there,with fingers interwoven, both handsPressed closely palm to palm, and to his mouthUpUfted, he, as through an instrument,Blew mimic Hootings to the s?ent owls,That theymight answer him; and theywould shoutAcross the watery vale, and shout again,Responsive to his caU,with quivering peals,And long haUoos and screams, and echoes loud,Redoubled and redoubled, concourse w?dOf jocund din; and, when a lengthened pauseOf s?ence came and baffled his best skiU,Then sometimes, in that silence wh?e he hungListening, a gentle shock of m?d surpriseHas carried far into his heart the voiceOf mountain torrents; or the visible sceneWould enter unawares into hismind,With aU its solemn imagery, its rocks,Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, receivedInto the bosom of the steady lake.

This Boywas taken from hismates, and diedIn ch?dhood, ere he was fi?l twelve years old.Fair is the spot,most beautiful the valeWhere he was born; the grassy churchyard hangs

Upon a slope above the v?lage school,And through that churchyard when my way has ledOn summer evenings, I believe that thereA long half hour together I have stoodMute, looking at the grave inwhich he lies!Wordsworth, The Prelude 5.364-397 (1850)


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CATHY CARUTHAn Interview withGeoffrey Hartman

Geoffrey artman's career xtendsfrom hispioneering earlywork onWordsworthtohis more recentwriting on video testimony.is recent ork has emphasized apossible continuityin this career:an exploration of the intricate elationbetweenwhat he calls "literaryknowledge" and the variousforms of traumatic loss. Iinterviewed im in thefall ofi??4 on his earlyand ongoingworkwithWordsworth,the implications f thisworkfor understanding literary ays of knowing, and therelation thismight have to thekind of knowing and testifyingrovided by videotestimony.

i. Traumatic Impasse and Poetic KnowledgeCC: I'm interested in the implications, for an understanding of poetry, orliterature in general, of your comment thatyour literarycriticalwork hasalways had a "concern for absences or intermittences of consciousness, forthe ambiguous status of accidents inmental life, for the ghosting of thesubject."1 The most obvious place to illustrate this early and ongoinginterest in absences and intermittenceswould be your repeated readings ofThe Prelude, and particularly the paradigmatic episode of the Boy ofWinander. You note that, in The Prelude,which you call the first accountof developmental psychology in our era, thisparticular episode surprisinglydescribes an impasse in development, and you go on to ask, in regard toit, "What is the relation of memory to loss, to loss of control perhaps, evento trauma?What kind of knowledge ispoetry?"2 You seem to be speakingalmost paradoxically, linking impasse and knowledge, trauma and poetry.I'd like you to comment on the kind of impassewe find inWordsworth,and how it is related specifically to poetic knowledge.GH: Trauma is generally defined as an experience that isnot experienced,that resists or escapes consciousness. In The Unmediated Vision I alreadymentioned a more mystical notion, that ofMeister Eckhart's Unerkennendes

i. See "Literary Studies and Traumatic Knowledge," New Literary History (Summer 1995).2. "Reading: The Wordsworthian Enlightenment" in European Romantidsm (1993).

SiR, 35 (Winter 1996)631


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632 CATHY CARUTHErkennen, an unknowing knowing. The context there was a necessary,whether deUberate or natural, anti-selfconsciousness. And certainly fromthe beginning I've been interested in how to define a specificaUy literaryknowledge, which can reveal without fuU consciousness, or systematicanalysis. Again, thinking back to The Unmediated Vision, its last chaptercaUed "The New Perseus" focused on the figure of theMedusa. It speculated that aswe move from the romantics into themodern period, thereis an attempt to see thingsunaided, to catch a reaUtyon the quick. I noticedinmodern authors a certain inner distancing or coldness, or an attempt toachieve a coldness despite the nearness to, the apparent nearness to, reaUty.I associated this coldness, leaning on theGreek myth, with Perseus' shield,which guarded him from the petrifying glance of theMedusa, and speculated that tradition functioned as this shield. Itmanaged to provide obUquity, or representational modes that had an inbu?t obUquity. But absentthese traditional decorums, the poet had to go against the real with theunshielded eye or the unshielded senses. This seemed to increase the riskand potential of trauma.Then, in theWordsworth book, I posited certain fixations, in particularwhat I caUed the spot syndrome, or the obsession with particular places,an obsession which came to the poet often unexpectedly and in ordinarycircumstances: "And there's a tree, of many one." I understood the emphasis on oneness, on singularity rather than unity, as being part of thesame complex, and which played a role in the drama of individuation.CC: So the spot syndromewas Unked with thatperceptual confrontation,or that unmediated vision.GH: Yes, and Iwas interested in how Wordsworth drew his stories andfictions out of his fascination with particular places. These highly chargedimages, I tried to show how the poet unblocked them, how he developedthem. Many of them were ocular. VisuaUty was dominant within hissensory organization; and something, caU it nature, caU it an economicprinciple within sensory organization, pitted the other senses against theeye. Symbolic process, I said,was related to this undoing of images.CC: Are you saying that the image was at first a block that had to beunblocked?GH: Yes. Or a fixation.CC: And thatWordsworth's poetry had to do with unblocking the eye?GH: Yes. Itwasn't necessarily that theywere always the same images, let'ssay primal images, or primal scene images. But whatever the psychicetiology, that structurewas there, andWordsworth talked quite openly


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INTERVIEW WITH GEOFFREY HARTMAN 633about the dominance of the eye. He confessed he had passed through aperiod of "picturesque" composition, and later felt that thiswas related toa stage of obsessive visuality. But there aremany other important statementsinWordsworth on the development of visuality and nature's counterpointing of visuality, and how his development as a poet has to do with that.CC: So visuality here is not something that immediately produces somekind of development, but presents itselfas an impasse to development, orpotentially so.GH: Yes. But as I also said, there is something powerfully abstract aboutvisuality, in distinction from individual images. So you can fall in love withthe visual, whereas you can't fall in love with obsessive images whichoverpower you or which you can't get rid of.CC: The distinction then isbetween perception as awhole mode, and theshock of an individual perception.GH: That's right. InWordsworth, themovement from charged individualimage to visuality is parallel to themovement from specific and hauntingplaces to Nature. Nature is his most generous concept. I try to connectthis evolution with a tension in the history of religion centering onepiphanic places. Bethel, for instance, the place where Jacob lies down andhas the dream of angels ascending and descending, is nothing but a stone.Yet here are the gates ofHeaven! It iswhat Mircea Eliade calls an omphalos:the umbilical and nether point of the earth. But there is another issue thatyou and I have talked about in relation to trauma: how almost anyplace?and that's part of the accidentality of revelation?can be revelatoryor charged or have something of a traumatic effect through deferred action.So, on the one hand, you have the omphalos, the umbilicus of theworld.On the other hand, it'smerely tree or stone; the seminal episode of TheRuined Cottage is the poet seeing four bare walls that remain, and a brokenpane of glass glittering in themoonlight.CC: So, as with visuality, the place can have, on the one hand, a traumatic,blocking effect,yet on the other this traumatic effect is intimately tied upwith the possibility of poetic writing, or poetic development. In theBoyofWinander episode, for example, as you point out, there is at onceimpasse and promise of development: the firstparagraph describing a boywho creates an instrument with his two hands to blow "mimic hootingsto the silent owls, " and who is suddenly confronted with the non-responseof the owls, a "lengthened pause," and a "gentle shock ofmild surprise."In the second verse paragraph, the boy is said to have died in youth, and


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634 CATHY CARUTHthe poet stands "Mute, looking at the grave inwhich he lies." How are"pause" and "shock" Unked to development here?GH: This is one of themost intriguing episodes inWordsworth. It is inpart autobiographical, aswe know from themanuscripts. The impassse, todescribe itvery briefly, is that the firstverse-paragraph leads one to expectthat the boy should grow intomaturity, and perhaps become a poet. Theimagination of the boy is being prepared through a dissonance: the owlsdo not respond, or respond as theyw?l. Within the context or experienceof responsiveness, something is not symmetrical, and this prepares for thefuture,develops the boy's consciousness of aworld that is independent ofhim. Remember the lengthened pause, which meets the boy's best skiU: itispart of the dissonance, because itmakes him reflective, and it anticipatesa further lengthening, untU the final pause ismortaUty or death?moreprecisely the ph?osophical mind that looks at death. So thatwh?e horizontaUy death is foreshadowed, you expect from the firstverse-paragraphthat in the second the poet would say, "I was that boy." Instead the boydies, and you have the poet as survivor looking at the boy's grave.CC: So you're saying thatnormaUy one would understand themoment ofabsence in the firstverse-paragraph as preparing the boy for some kind ofself-consciousness, and ultimately, though at a greater temporal distance,his death. But in this case the death comes before self-consciousnessemerges. Could one say, then, that the impasse for the poet, the traumaticmoment in the developmental scheme, is not the death as such, but thefact that the death comes at thewrong time?GH: Yes, the death is untimely, but not only the death. Wordsworth addsan argumentative frame to theBoy ofWinander episode when he insertsit into Book 5 of The Prelude. He argues thatwe cannot totaUy preparethe developing psyche, the young person, forwhat befaUs. That would be,he claims, engineering the psyche. Natural development ismuch freer anddepends on accident. And accident is always defined as something youcannot prepare for. In that sense development is always both propadeuticand exceeds formal training. So that trauma is related to development byexcess asweU as lack.Yet Wordsworth's greatmyth inThe Prelude remains:that there could be development?a "growth of the poet's mind"?without psychic wounds, that the psyche could be "from aU internal injuryexempt. "

CC: But what is the relation between lack and excess in this accident?GH: Keeping strictlyto thepassage, the fa?ure of responsemay have Unkeditself, in themind of the poet, to a thought of death. This intuition is then


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INTERVIEW WITH GEOFFREY HARTMAN 635literalized, by prophetic extension, as in the Lucy poems. A failure ofresponse anticipates?by the extremest reach ofWordsworth's imagination?that therewould be no more nature. That if the human mind doesnot live fully, responsively, within nature, or nature does not respond tous, then the end-result, projected forward, is apocalyptic. The death is likea hyperbole of thismoment, a hyperbolic act of an imagination that leapsdown not up, taking off from a simple failure of response. Should thisfailure of response accelerate, thenwe will have no habitat, no mutualityof nature and the human mind. At this point you transcend the development of the individual, you get amore cosmic model, you speed up time,and that's apocalypse.So that themoment of excess is not only in thewild hooting of theowls when it comes, but in the imagination itselfwhich reacts to bothfailure of response and an "ecstatic" correlative of death, that piercing ofthe skin of the psyche when the natural scene "enter[s] unawares into [theboy's] mind."CC: Yet the impasse is, in a sense, passed through: at the end of the episodeyou do not simply have a death but a poet who is looking at, reflectingupon, this death (andwriting the poem). The problem that arises, then, istheway that poetic and exemplary moment is characterized: even thoughit is a poetic moment, it is also amoment ofmuteness (which peculiarlydoes not seem to be completely opposed to poetic writing). And thisbringsback the problem of how development, here, is not simply dialectical,taking the negative andmaking itpositive. You say specifically about thatmute moment, "we sense that the poet is looking aswell into himself, thathe is a posthumous figure, he stands towards a prior stage of life,as a reader,a quasi-epitaphic reader . . . the poet's stance emerges as a haunting issue."3If the poem is in some sense about poetic knowing, how can itbe mute,how is themuteness poetic, or what is the link between muteness andpoetry?GH: Let me bring in the reader, at thispoint. The theme of time?of itsflow?brings us to the reader, just as inMilton's Lycidas. Milton foreseeswhat he calls "lucky words": "I should utter something in honor ofLycidas, and so in the future, I hope someone will write my epitaph, andmake the passerby [who could be the reader] turn and be struckby whathas been said about me." This fast-forwarding of imagination iswhat Imean by a posthumous stance inWordsworth and it includes an adumbration of the reader.Wordsworth allows you tomove from the poet lookingat the grave of the boy to the reader reading the poet, an image of

3. "Reading: The Wordsworthian Enlightenment."


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636 CATHY CARUTHspeechless and perhaps epitaphic reading. The problem is then: how domute speech and (self reading relate?We go frommuteness tomuteness, even if it is amuteness described inwords. That is, theBoy ofWinander?and this is one reason why we feelthat the episode was meant to be paradigmatic of human development, andthat the death came too soon?is shown at the point where speech is st?l

mimicry. He is not shown speaking, he makes a pastoral pipe with hishands, but this is not speech. He doesn't mimic speech, he mimics theowls, nature's sounds. And so you expect the question to be: how do yougo from that stage tomature poetic speech? Yet The Prelude records thegrowth of the poet's mind, not of speech itself. ou are given the pre-mature moment, then the mature moment, but the mature moment is likethe pre-mature moment, because the pause is lengthened, and you areshown a s?ent poet. Now what does itmean to be a s?ent poet? Speechisnot theorized inWordsworth, as an agency in the growth of the (poetic)

mind.CC: It's almost as if the poem moved from what is caUed the "preverbal"or the "preverbal trauma"?trauma before it can even enter as a verbalconstruct?to muteness, and the paradoxical poetic development, at leastin this episode, is theUnk between thispreverbal or "shocking" perceptionand muteness. And the difficulty thatyou're trying to get at is to say thatthat somehow isUnked to poetic insight.GH: The impasse isnot dialectized, as you correctly say.We go from oneform of muteness to another form of muteness, yetWordsworth speaksagain and again about muteness. About mute insensate things. He doesn'tsimply want to speaker them. It's not an orphie perspective. There is,perhaps, something potentiaUy orphie in the firstverse paragraph, but evenif it is orphie, nature won't cooperate. It's not reaUy orphie, then, not amyth that animates nature, not a Rilkean myth of internaUzing nature ormaking it invisible, not a Blakean transformation either, not a metamorphosis or anthropomorphizing of any kind. The mute insensate thingsremainmute and insensate. But they'rebrought ive intohumanperceptionandthey lay a part, like themother does.Mute dialogues with nature exist, asbetween chUd and mother. The muteness isnot always negative: it can be,at times, the shadow cast by ecstasy.CC: Maybe one way to restate the question would be to look at somethingelse you say about s?ence. You say that the entire episode, even it isbasedin part on fa?ure of response, isframed, Iwould say paradoxicaUy, as anaddress. Your words are specificaUy, "his address to Winander claims a


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INTERVIEW WITH GEOFFREY HARTMAN 637sufficientfoundation in humanity by being an aversio aswell as an exclamation. That is, by using a turntale, in Putnam's words, to invoke apreternatural or mute witness."4 So in the classical case there is a witness,amute witness, the fields ofWinander, the cliffsofWinander. Iwant toask: is there a link between the failure of response that theboy experiences,then themuteness of thepoet, and thepoem's frame of address?an addressthat implies a response?GH: Yes, but Iwould phrase it differently.The address to the cliffsandislands ofWinander evokes a lastingor apparently lastingpresence, and thispresence recurs at the end of theBoy ofWinander episode with the Lady,theChurch, also a kind ofmonitory shape. You really have three figures:the cliffsand islands, the poet himself at the grave, and finally theChurch,watching over the children among whom theBoy ofWinander lies.CC: They're allwitnesses.GH: Monitory shapes. One is tempted to say "witness," and "witness" iscertainly appropriate to the forms of nature evoked at the beginning of theepisode because of the formal force of the apostrophe. I am always reminded of Coleridge's marvelous phrase in his lines after hearingWordsworth recite the poem on his own life, "The dread watchtower ofman's absolute self." It's close to that, almost an eternity-figure, a figurefor conscience, a super-ego. The beginning of the episode, the apostropheto the cliffsand islands ofWinander, puts human development within aquasi-eternal frame.CC: Because the cliffsare eternal?GH: Yes?the danger of apocalypse, of Nature (familiar nature) disappearing, is distanced here. There is lastingness, the sense of not only watchfulbut enduring presences. Which sense is instilled in theBoy from Nature.Instilled inWordsworth also, from nature, and it becomes an instinctivearticle of faith. That something endures. That something is immortal oruniversal. It isnot in the case of theBoy ofWinander quite what Coleridgefelt: Coleridge's special emphasis is on anxiety, the dread watchtower.That's not inWordsworth, but itgoes along the same lines, along the sameemotional spectrum, though it has more of a consolation, an assurance thatnature will notbe no more. And ithas the effect of affirming, in that sensewitnessing, the boy's experience. It does not deny theBoy, it does not say,hey little titch,you think you're important. So the entire tonality of theexperience is different from Coleridge's watchtower at thismoment, it's

4. "Reading: The Wordsworthian Enlightenment."


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638 CATHY CARUTHmore like the other presences, the starsrising and setting.That has alwaysintriguedme, "rising or setting." You remember those are the Unes thatfoUow the apostrophe. You get a sense of vast cycUcalmovement: itdoesn'tmatter whether they're rising or setting, they're always rising or setting,orsetting and rising. They're always going to be there. The setting is not adeath: rising or setting, theywiU be there. It is a perpetual backgroundwhich does not negate or threaten, but affirms the individual Ufe. Ifyouwish, bears witness to it in fact. And the reason why it can do this,otherthan some kind of grand sentimental projection, has to do withWordsworth's pecuUar, non-Coleridgean Angst, always kept in check bythat sense of permanent presences. Wordsworth's fear is that if the humanmind separates, divorces itself rom nature, and we invest our imaginationelsewhere, then and only then is there clanger of the fading of nature. Inother words, precisely the ego, the psyche, is not ghosted inWordsworthby nature, as itmust be ghosted by the supernatural. Yet Wordsworth seesthat if,because of industriaUzation and a turning away from aNature ethos,nature is neglected, then the situationwiU drasticaUy change. But here heremains within the faith that human life is not ghosted but affirmed bynature.

CC: Yet you speak elsewhere, as I said, of thepoet's stance as a "haunting"issue . . .Wouldn't your emphasis now on the "affirmation" by nature beinterpreted as overlooking that haunting aspect?GH: One cannot forget that the ch?d ishaunted byNature, and the deathof theBoy ofWinander could express thisghosting in the form of a "returnto nature." The balance here between affirmative and negative is a "natural" one, and the reader recognizes that, and does not wish to interveneconcerning what in the poet's brooding is, at once, mortaUty and anintimation of immortaUty: the promise, cut short, of a communion with

Nature which approaches ecstasy.The poet looking at the grave, and framed by these otherwitness figures,does not stress the ghosting of human life, does not stressmortification.MortaUty is therebut notmortification. So itworks against trauma, Iwouldsay. Look, everythingworks against trauma inWordsworth, yet the basisof trauma is there. "A gentle shock of m?d surprise." Now reaUy!The muteness of the poet in the episode also raisesmore generaUy thequestion of themuteness in poetic speech. For his standing there "mute"is a kind of fading?counterpointed by his "fuU half-hour" steadfastness. Iexplore paraUels in "Words andWounds," and the essay on ChristopherSmart in The Fate ofReading.5 We avoid, evade, muteness, but it's always

5. "Christopher Smart's Magnificat: Toward a Theory ofRepresentation" in The Fate ofReading and Other Essays (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975).


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INTERVIEW WITH GEOFFREY HARTMAN 639there.We speak, but under certain conditions, as ifwe were allowed tospeak only when fulfilling these conditions: and so euphemic modes areproduced. The muteness indicates that there's something which is toodifficult to utter. The way to get past thatdifficulty,however you conceiveof themonitors, the dread you have to get past, however you conceive ofit, or whatever Freudian understanding you may give to it, involveseuphemism in the strong sense. Even ironymay be euphemistic. Irony, theboast of themodern poet, remainswithin the euphemic mode (though the

modern poet would say I'm "destroying euphemism").6 It's not satire's madlaughter?satire breaks through the euphemic. It is not cursing. In otherwords, there is amode of breaking through and I'm assuming that there

was trauma, shock, something dreadful or ecstatic. You know that thereexists a pathology of speech, inwhich the person speaks only by cursing.And I say there is also amode of speech inwhich the person talks only interms of blessings. We arrange ourselves between these two extremes.

2. Pausal StyleCC: That brings me to the second point Iwanted to raise. The generalargument you're making here, and in a number of differentplaces, concernspoetic style,which you refer to as "pausal style," and again it appears tosuggest a paradoxical link between something that interruptsand somethingthat continues. You mention specifically that at the very moment of theturn to an ordinary style, or conversational language, there's a pressure onconversation, something that remains missed and impossible.GH: I do say that, I feel there is a tension which I'm not sure how it isresolvable, between the development, almost the genesis, in terms of thehistory of poetry?of the conversational style, and the pressure of imagination which ismore traumatic, interruptive, transcendental. And I thinkit is part of Wordsworth's gift to contain each within each. There arepoints, however, where you feel that the suturingwill give way.CC: My impression was nonetheless that it's still the conversational stylethat's saving poetry. You say that poetry ismortal, and that Wordsworthassured the continuity of great poetry by a revolution of style.And it seemsthat you were saying that the conversation, or ordinary language, theconversational style, saves poetry, but only in relation to this interruptiveor pausal awareness.

6. See also Geoffrey Hartman, "The Interpreter's Freud" in Easy Pieces (New York:Columbia UP, 1985). For an excellent elaboration of the idea of euphemism in anotherWordsworthian context, see Kevis Goodman's essay in this collection, "Making Time forHistory: Wordsworth, The New Historicism, and the Apocalyptic Fallacy."


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640 CATHY CARUTHGH: Yes. It's Wordsworth's conversational style that saves it. Not conversation, because conversational style, insofar as it comes out of the epistolarymode, or middle style, is an achievement of the late seventeenth andeighteenth century, and faUs into habits of what Wordsworth caUed "poeticdiction. " That is, it elevates itselfdespite itself,and isn't reaUy genuinelyconversational. It's fam?iar in the sense that the author tries to speak tothe audience as equal to equal, but in factwhen we read the epistles, anyof the episdes, whether Pope's poetic epistles or Chesterfield's letters,weface an artificial tone and diction. But Wordsworth, as certain notoriouslyrics show?think of "The Idiot Boy"?would rather have bathos thanan artificiaUyelevated diction.CC: Does this conversational stylefound something thatwould be linkedtomodern poetry?GH: Iwould think yes. The main Une ofmodern poetry develops thatUnk. And in Ashbery, the casualness can become excessive. The moreexcessive itbecomes, themore you feel an internal pressure that is beingevaded.CC: So this so-caUed ordinary style inWordsworth

is shadowed by thatpausal sensitivity.GH: Always.CC: Could thatbe amodern sensitivity: that the ordinary is inextricablybound to the pausal or interruptive?GH: Iwonder. Possibly. But trauma is not modern. You don't need atheory of trauma to "experience" trauma. And in terms of a historicalschematism I have only one firm idea, namely thatwhat I caU theEasternepiphanic style, visible in the Great Odes and neoclassicism, has traumadirecdy inscribed into it.By epiphanic style Imean a stylewith sharp turns,of which the apostrophe at thebeginning of theBoy ofWinander is a faintecho. And by Eastern Imean themoment in theAncient Mariner (writtenin the older style)when "at one stride comes the dark." That abruptnessis inscribed in the older style.But it's not inWordsworth: "A gentle shockof mild surprise." Insteadwe have a sense of continuity or achievement ofsomething much, much m?der, not that you ever lose the sense of thepressure of what thatm?dness is in function of, but theWordsworthianpoetic turn, let's not talk about revolution for a moment, creates a conversational poetic style that subsumes the epiphanic style. So that he doesnot go from, he doesn't jump from nature into the supernatural. There isno dream vision, almost none in him. Eastern is not just a geographicalcategory, although it has something to do with the "at one stride comes


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INTERVIEW WITH GEOFFREY HARTMAN 641the dark." Imaginatively, if there's no twilight, then you are already in thezone of trauma.CC: Iwonder ifyour interest in, on the one hand, the relation betweenimaginative pressure and this interruptivemode, which you're also tryingto see in the relation to style,and on the other hand ordinary conversationalstyle,has something to do with a more general notion ofmodern writing.When trauma theory emerges as a modern theoretical mode of writing,after all, it emerges as something within ordinary life.GH: That is true. Theory as a mode of discourse is anti-conversational,and links up with the pressure of trauma. Iwould prefer to focus here onliterary knowledge: how literature is a mode of experience. In the nonpathological course of events, the "unclaimed experience," as you call it,can only be reclaimed by literaryknowledge.7CC: When you speak about this literary knowledge in your essay ontrauma studies and literature, you suggest that trauma studies allow us toread the relationship of words and wounds without medical or politicalreductionism and you say specifically thatfigurative or poetic language islinked to trauma.8 Could you expand on that a bit, because there seemsto be a kind of a paradox: normally one would think of trauma as theabsencing of the possibility of speech, but you link it inherently to figurative language.GH: I've always been intrigued by certain basic literary forms, and theriddle is one of them. I suggest that all poetic language partakes of theriddle form,with its surplus of signifiers.An answer is evoked, but can youget to the answer? If you could get there, the signifierswould becomeredundant and fall away. But in poetry you can't get to the answer. So thesignifierskeep pointing towhat ismissing. Or mute. There's too litde thatis referred to, if you want to use that scheme, and too much that issuggested. But I've not been able to develop fully the poetry-riddle relation. I'm not a systematic thinker. I began this line of speculation in "TheVoice of the Shuttle,"9 where muteness and trauma are at the center,Philomela's tongue having been cut out. "The voice of the shuttle" is,youremember, a phrase cited inAristotle's Poetics. It refers to,we think, thePhilomela story:how her shuttleweaves a garment that restores her voice.

7- See Cathy Caruth, "Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History,"Yale French Studies 79 (1991), reprinted inUnclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, andHistory(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996).8. "Literary Studies and Traumatic Knowledge."9. "The Voice of the Shuttle: Language from the Point of View of Literature" in BeyondFormalism: Literary Essays 1958-1970 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1970).


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642 CATHY CARUTHBut the compactness itselfof the phrase is riddling, and I try to describethat structure as, basicaUy, over-specified ends ("voice" and "shuttle") andsomething in themiddle that ismuted or leftout. And I suggest that aUfigurative language has these overspecified ends, as if themiddle were cutout. It is the cutting out that's important.CC: Yes, and cutting, rather than erasing, which is relevant.GH: Yes, we gUmpse figuration as a counter-force. My essay, however,stops short at one point, and I've never been able to extend it. I speculatethat the very structure of figurative language, if it has these overspecifiedends and an absentmiddle?which interpretation can fiU in?also holds fornarration. But I don't show itby a narratological analysis. I simply suggestthat in theOedipus story you can glimpse an extension from figurativelanguage to narrative structure. Insofar as the Oedipus story converges onincest, persons do not have enough space for development. Incest violatesdevelopmental space. It coUapses theplot of Ufe. I trytobring that structuretogetherwith the overspecified ends and the middle that is lost.CC: Are you saying that figurative or poetic language is linked in someway to "trauma," or the kind of muteness you've been interested in aUalong? Ifwe think of muteness through the Boy ofWinander, thenlanguage wouldn't be somuch trying to get at some kind of experience

which is ever-receding, but at a failure of experience. Because the muteness, the muteness of the Boy, is a fa?ure of response, you said. So is thataway of saying thatfigurativeness is referential because the referent itselfhas to do with fa?ure? In other words, you suggest that the figurationuncann?y intensifies the referent, and I am asking if that is because thereferent for you has always been, insofar as you are Wordsworthian, afailure of response in some way, or linked to untimely speech?GH: That is a far-reaching thought, and I touch on a "mimetic" strengthening of the referent in "I. A. Richards and the Dream of Communication."10 Yet I'm not sure Iwant to give the referent that specific a content.Because in poetry it is not entirely empirical or historical. The fact thatfiguration,moreover, uncannily intensifies the (deferred) referent, indicatesa desire (however frustrated) for "timely utterance"?even for propheticor ecstatic speech. But I accept everything you say about untimeliness.Trauma is certainly linked to the untimely. In the basic theory of trauma,derived from Freud, you weren't prepared (hence also a certain anxiety).And it is doubtful that you could be prepared for either sheU-shock orexperience shock. Wordsworth's argument is, Nature does everything toprepare you, to make you immune, or to gentle the shock. He doesn't say

io. "LA. Richards and the Dream of Communication" in The Fate ofReading.


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INTERVIEW WITH GEOFFREY HARTMAN 643there isno shock, or surprise,but thatnature aims at a growth of themindwhich can absorb or overcome shock.

3. Video Testimony and the Place ofModern MemoryCC: We have been talking about Wordsworth's revolution in style, anditsway of communicating (without succumbing to) shock. Do you thinkthat there is another, similar revolution of style,after themomentous eventsin this century thatwe have passed through? In your recent work, youhave begun to focus on the video testimony project in the FortunoffHolocaust Video Archives atYale, which you helped found, and inwhichindividuals are filmed telling their stories, in relatively undirected fashion,to trained interviewers. In recent years, you have talked about these videosas providing a means of communicating or witnessing an event that isdifficult to represent adequately by other means?for example in theseemingly realistic medium of mainstream movies, which, as you suggest,become less realistic, or more surrealistic, the more realistically they attemptto portray visual detail.11Would you say, then, that the video testimoniesalso represent a revolution in style for communicating this kind of event?GH: Yes, but see for yourself! They are effective as an antidote, withintechnology, within the era of mechanical reproduction, to the glossysuper-realism of themedia. They are audiovisual and yet do not privilegethe ocular or assault the eye. I have suggested that they avoid the contagionof "secondary trauma"?that they allow the sensitive mind space forreflection, even if there is shock.CC: You have talked about the effacement of an earlier type of recollectionmarked by memory places. I'm curious if that reflective moment inWordsworth, which you look at in theBoy ofWinander as paradigmatic,is linked in anyway, through the problems ofmuteness and speaking thatit raises, to later questions you come up against, in regard to contemporaryattempts to remember.GH: They are linked. The reflectivemoment must be at the center of this.By "must be," Imean forme, when I compare what interestedme in

Wordsworth, and what I'm interested in now?the role that video testimony can play in remembrance. My focus, on the one hand, on theindividual as individual and hismemory processes, and on the other hand,on what can be called public memory,12 how a public knows or couldknow about events, is linked to an increasingly besieged and competitivecondition which many have talked about. A condition inwhich our mind

ii. See "Reading theWound: Testimony, Art and Trauma" in The Longest Shadow: IntheAftermath of the olocaust (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996).12. See "Public Memory and ItsDiscontents" in The Longest Shadow.


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644 CATHY CARUTHis actuaUy blocked, rather than encouraged, prevented from developingmentaUy, experientiaUy, by our very virtuosity in reconstructing technicaUywhat occurred. Max Frisch said that technology was the knack of soarranging the world thatwe didn't have to experience it.You have asurplus of simulacra, technicaUy transmitted, but subder mediations areeUded. So thatone isnever quite released from this surround of simulacra.The question therefore arises,What happens to reflection in this increasingly ocular situation?There is a relation between that andmy understanding ofWordsworth,orWordsworth's self-understanding, since he talks propheticaUy, towardsthe beginning of the industrial revolution, about the increasing pressure ofexternal stimuU,which act on themind Uke a drug that causes dependence.

He mentions specificaUy journaUsm, urbanization, and (st?l a part of journaUsm), "wretched and frantic novels," where theword "novel" containstheword "news." These things converge to besiege themind, and depriveit of themoment of reflection. There is no mind without a pastoral space,and this is disappearing. The pastoral and the Utopian may be close, butthe pastoral is not quite the Utopian because, inWordsworth at least, it iswithin time. Itmay be an imagined place, but itoccurs within time. Onedoes have space within time, for reflection, one must have. Where else ismind?And here of course the psychological dimension comes in, and thisfascinatedme, because itpointed also towhat I had observed in the historyof religion: that revelation is always linked to specific place. These placescan be given a national or nationaUstic interpretation. Itmay be that therevelation, in order to fire up the community beyond the individual whohas it, needs to be substantiated by evidential deta?, such as the idea ofspecific place. And it has to be an earth-place, it doesn't work asweU ifit's a place in the air. To have a revelation it has to be associated withspecific place, even ifyou don't know anymore where that place is.Andof course, as inmodern Israel or Islam, people st?l claim Moriah is here,no,Moriah is over there, and so on. To locateMoriah, you actuaUy needtwo things, name and place. You need those specifics; you need placenames, ifyou wish. And a certain storied deta?.Now Iwas made conscious of the arbitrariness of this,why this placeand not another. Time is also in question, but the time is always needy, atime of urgency, a time of crisis, and hence the pressure of apocalypticthoughts. Yet why should it be this place rather than another, since thereveaUng force, caU itGod, could manifest itselfanywhere?There is, then, a fertile tension between the potential universaUty of themessage of revelation, and the accidentality and individuaUty of place andperson, of the bearer and the location. InWordsworth's case, and this ispart of his originaUty, place becomes memory-place: spots of time, spots


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INTERVIEW WITH GEOFFREY HARTMAN 645in and creative of a temporal consciousness. That is, the reflectivemomentis introduced in all itsdimensions. And there is recovery. For the recoveryto be effective, salutary, it has to be associated with place. It cannot besimply a feeling. There are feelingswithout place inWordsworth, but heisnot satisfiedwith those, he wants to follow them to a surreptitious source."Where shall I seek the origin?" Where the fountain from which thisfeeling or this specific thought came? But clearly it is impossible to envisagean origin without thinking of emplacement. So the recovery, the retrievalprocess, insofar as it can be called healing or therapeutic, involves thenotion of place, the image of a power place.I do not know how much of this, inWordsworth or inmy ownthinking, is related to a need for thought to be situated, and safely situated.For the power place keeps working thememory, as if itwere the pulse

which allows that stream, the stream of consciousness, to continue, so it'snot that there is only?in Wordsworth?a desire to rest. The reflectivemoment is not just amoment of pastoral safetyand rest but onewhere youcan be equal to your experience.Implicit inmuch I have done is ameditation on place and its relationtomemory and identity (individual rather than collective). Itwasn't the

study ofWordsworth that ledme to study theHolocaust. There is a clearseparation between these two subjects. But once I had engaged withquestions theHolocaust raised forme?how do I take this into consciousness, what can I do about it, is this in any way thinkable, is it representable?once I had gone along that path, my interest inWordsworth's

understanding of thememory process did come in. I sensed a loss ofmemory place, of theWordsworthian memory place, after the Holocaustand after entering an era ofmechanical reproduction. While the places ofJewish existence destroyed in theHolocaust are remembered, they cannotbe as dynamic in the individual consciousness as theWordsworthian memory places. Alas, they are severed, or fixed or nostalgic. And in relation totheWordsworthian perspective of a memory not hindered by shock, Ithink there is always a question inmy mind how future generations canbe brought to remember theHolocaust without secondary trauma. I don'tunderestimate defenses, of course, and don't claim that everybody is all thatsensitive. My move is not a protectionist move. It's more a question ofhow trauma can work creatively rather than destructively in one's life.CC: It's the opposite of protectionism because inyour argument, a violentimposition often ends up numbing the psyche, so that in fact by makingit less violent one paradoxically allows formore of a shock.GH: It is, as you say, precisely the question of how sensitivity can bemaintained, and how sensory overload, leading to numbing, leading tofeelings of impotence, can be avoided. Or as in someHolocaust studies?to


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646 CATHY CARUTHfeelings ofmystery and enigma, which I do not value. I do not reject allfeelings ofmystery, but I don't want them to become protectionist, onlyprotective. Iwant to see as clearly as possible, and yet preserve the reflective

moment sufficiendy so that something creative comes about. In terms offuture generations especially, the dialectic theremay be very complex,because for themwhat must be overcome is not only numbness but alsoindifference.CC: So the question of representation thatwe're looking at now concernsnot only the nature of the different events that are represented, that is, theHolocaust as opposed towhatever itwas thatwas traumatic before (orafter),but specifically thepossibility formodes of representation to prevent,rather than create, indifference.GH: Yes, I agree with thatwholeheartedly. There really is something atonce terrible and hypnotic in contemporary representations of violence, intheir directness and detail.CC: Curiously, then, the less direct mode of the video testimonywouldseem, in your view, to permit more of a sense of events to enter, withoutthe hypnotic

ornumbing quality of direct visual representation. I

amwondering if thiswould help us understand what you meant when yousaid, in one essay, thatyour concern with video testimony has to do withthe ethical aspect of representation;13what would be ethical in thismodeof representationwould be, paradoxically, how itgives lessdirectly to sight,or raises questions about what itmeans to see, and what the relation isbetween seeing and knowing.GH: That is correct. If it is sufficient to describe the ethical as somethingthat leads to questions, rather than to decisive action. Moreover, the"hypnosis" in literature and art tests s ethically. Iwould have to add that,being an intellectual, it's hard forme to conceive of the ethical as possiblewithout reflection.CC: I'm not sure thatbringing questioning into it, or reflection, actuallyopposes itself to action.GH: InWordsworth this is quite clear in theBoy ofWinander episode.He saw the activitywithin contemplation. He breaks down

the dichotomybetween action and reflection, action and contemplation. Not succumbingto the hypnosis replays this issue of reflective answering, of pushing backagainst what comes from outside. I come back to theWordsworthianinsistence on a creative response to what is given. Again, to qualify, the

13. "Public Memory and ItsDiscontents."


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INTERVIEW WITH GEOFFREY HARTMAN 647Holocaust is not only the type or general instance of a violent historicalevent, but there are very specific features of itwhich make video testimonyan important agent, an instrument, Iwould have to say, ofmemory.CC: In this light,what are the continuities and differences between theromantic texts that you've worked on, and the speech-texts of videotestimony?GH: What one finds occasionaUy inWordsworth is something Uke naturalmetaphor. I think of a fragment from the time of writing his first greatpoem, The Ruined Cottage. Margaret is abandoned, her husband having soldhimself into the army because he couldn't bear seeing his children andwifestarve. In the fragmentMargaret says about the baker's wagon which usedto stop, but now goes by because the baker knows there's no businessthere: "thatwagon does not care for us." She doesn't want to say, "Thebaker doesn't care," she therefore says the wagon doesn't. That's whatAnna Devere Smith caUs "naturaUy figurative speech." A vernacular vigorin the speech of ordinary people.14 And this you also have in the speechof thewitnesses, many ofwhom, in the United States, are not especiaUyUterate. Because coming toAmerica the survivors became displaced persons, separated from their culture, whose education was interrupted, andwho after thewar did not always have themeans to take up their educationagain. They had to live in a strange land, theyhad to learn a new language.... So inAmerica many of the survivors are not people who could writeit down. But their speech nevertheless has a certain eloquence. It has thepathos and vigor of the ordinary people Wordsworth tries to evoke inLyrical Ballads.CC: You have also talked about the "mute eloquence" of the survivors'gestures. The muteness in the gestures suggests that there is a resistance tothe teUing of these stories beyond the question of skiU in writing orspeaking, a difficultyUnked to the problem ofmemory andmemory placesthatyou mentioned above. Iwonder if some of your thinking about thevideo archive in terms ofwhat itmakes possible in the relation betweensight and the sound of thewords?or the natural eloquence of the speechand the mute eloquence of the gestures?suggests a way of creating a placeof memory.15GH: I'd have to repeat first of aU that something has happened tomemoryplaces, because it's difficult to think of the camps as being suchmemory

14. See Anna Devere Smith, Twilight?Los Angeles, 1992: On theRoad: A Search forAmerican Character (New York: Anchor Books, 1994).15. See "Learning from Survivors: The Yale Testimony Project," Holocaust and GenocideStudies 9.2 (Fall 1995) and The Longest Shadow.


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648 CATHY CARUTHplaces, although obviously they are fixed in the imagination of the survivors. The older lieux de m?moire, thememory places the survivor has leftbehind, were the traditional ones of home or native region. Yet we findit very difficult to get specific information, when we try to questionsurvivors about the time before the camps. It is so far in the past, and, itmay be too painful to recall. But the camps?they are not like aWordsworthian memory place, although there is something sinisteror dark aboutWordsworth's spot of time.I like your formulation that theArchive itselfcreates a place ofmemory.But letme talk of what is in the Archive?the stories. And letme alsoseparate these storiesfrommemory place for themoment, although I thinkthe traditional story is often focused by amemory place. I have to say twothings.We call the survivor testimonies "stories," but I'm uneasy with that

word. I say "story," because it's the most common word. I don't want tosay "tale," which is too close to fiction, and "narrative" I find cold. Thetestimony isnot a storywith narrative desire. On the few occasions whenI have found a story toldwith suspense or picaresque gusto, for instance,the Schlomo Perl storyfilmed as Europa, Europa, I begin to doubt. It is, inany case, very untypical. The testimonies are not stories about overcomingobstacles by cunning or other qualities, so thatyou could survive. Accidentplayed amuch greater role in survival, as did physical strength or havinga trade needed in the camps, than powers of intellect, discernment, intuition, and so on.

Secondly, you don't have suspense, and for a very simple reason. Theunivers concentrationnairenwhich the inmates lived blinded them to thefuture. There was no future. "Tomorrow" became, for most, a horizonbeyond which mind could not stretch.Everything had to be concentratedon the sheer attempt, this moment, and the next, and the next, to keepalive. So that an element which is essential to story-telling,foreshadowing,keeping things in suspense, until you know how to resolve them?thatdimension, in the consciousness of the survivor, was rarely there. Yetallowing the survivor now to tell something like a story, even though itdoesn't have strong properties of suspense or narrative desire, restores whathad been taken away. It restores a power of communicating with the futureor toward the future, a futuremost clearly indicated by interviewersthemselves and thismode of communication (the video testimony)whichcan speak to the generation after, including their own sons and daughters.It is retrieval in that sense, it is recuperated in that sense. In other words,the capacity of telling a story,even though itdoesn't have the characteristicof a fictional story, restores to the survivorwho tells it this capacity toimagine a future, a transgenerational effect coming from his own act oftelling.


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INTERVIEW WITH GEOFFREY HARTMAN 649CC: But how then iswhat isn't narratively experienced communicated?And does this have something specific to do with the visual mode of thevideo?GH: What you caU themute element is to some extent in the brokenlanguage, in itspoetry. But always inwhat might be caUed the reembodiment of the survivors. Imean by that theirgestures, the ensemble of theirgestures. AUowing them to be represented by the medium is a veryimportant effect of themedium. It makes more sense against the background of deprivation. Because another thing survivorswere deprived of,deUberately of course, was their body. Its ordinary, human fuUness.Thatis not speech. Given the historical background of the deprivation, this isan important dimension, quite apart from the semiotics of gestures,whichfaU into the area of speech.CC: What about theway inwhich the survivor faces the camera, andseems in that sense to create a kind of address? You have spoken aboutvideo testimony as activating awiUingness toUsten, of a person being madeinto an addressee of a conversation. You say in speaking about the videotestimonies:

Wh?e survivor testimony eUcits its own kind of dialogue, it is onlypartly a dialogue with us. Survivors face not only a Uving audience,or now accept that audience rather than insisting on the intransitivecharacter of their experience. They also face familymembers andfriends who perished. It is thewitnesses who undertake that descentto the dead. They address the Uving frontaUy.Often using warningsand admonishments they also speak for the dead, or in their name.This has itsclangers.To go down may be easy, but to come up again,that is the hard task. "I am not among the Uving, but no one noticesit,"Charlotte Delbo wrote. So they remember the dead, that they toowere in the house of the dead, yet they are not back here, but trulyinstructingus. ("Learning from Survivors")

This takes us back to the question of response, lack of response and address.One of the things that you're bringing forward from your earlierwork,and forme specificaUyfrom theBoy ofWinander episode, is the relationbetween a moment of reflection and an address, an address that is notsimply aimed at the living. Here, in the testimonies, you also have anaddress that is directed not only to the living but to the dead. That issomething thatyou remarked on in talking about theWordsworth poem:you said the apostrophe as a figure of speech comes from an apostropheto the dead.


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650 CATHY CARUTHGH: Yes, to define thatmode of address is essential.We're talking abouta structure. In the classical apostrophe, you turn to the dead in order tosummon their help. You swear by them. But it is not thatyou're askingfor their help, necessarily, it is that you have to represent them. At leastthat's true of the camp survivor. Iwould put it thisway, perhaps. You,the survivor, are a?ve, they are dead, but you have to speak in some waywith the voice of the dead. Obversely, wh?e in the camp, you were in auniverse of death, but st?l therewas something alive in you. In both casesthere is a chiasmic relation between the survivor and his past self as campinmate. The survivor, part of him is stillwith the dead, whether he usesthe figure of address or not. For the camp inmate, and that's part of theobligation of thewitness, to face it?even though he was dead or as ifdeadtherewere st?lmoments of extraordinary life.

4. Interrupted PastoralCC: Iwant to close with a question about your own life. In describingyour passage out of Europe, when you were a boy, you talk about the lovethat you had for the English countryside, how distant you felt fromeverything, and the love of nature you had then: "I felt at home in thegentle countryside of Buckinghamshire."16 You didn't experience yourexperience as a constant shock at that time.And Iwas struckby somethingthat you say at the end of your introduction toHolocaust Remembrance,about your more present situation as an academic, where you are on theway to a lecture during the faU:

It ismid-October. InNew England the leaves have turned. One ortwo begin to float in the crisp air. Further north many maples havealready shed half their gold, a hectic treasure for the ch?dren. I seethem in the large frontyard of an old house, running and shouting,five of them, all sizes.A woman is raking the leaves, or trying to.Thech?dren, romping around, undo her work; she cuffs them with therake, as tolerantly as a kitten a perplexing baU or comatose object. Thep?e of raked leaves grows, and the ch?dren invent a new game. TheycoUapse into the p?e, spreading out deliriously, while thewoman?mother, housekeeper?abets their game, and covers them with thest?l fragrant, Ught leaves. At first giggles and squeaks, then, as thetumulus rises to a respectable height, total s?ence. But only for aminute. For, as ifon signal, aU emerge simultaneously from the leafytomb, jumping out, laughing, resurrected to themock surprise of theone who is raking and who patiently begins again.16. "The Longest Shadow" in Testimony. Contemporary Writers make the olocaust Personal,ed. David Rosenberg (New York: Random House, 1989).


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INTERVIEW WITH GEOFFREY HARTMAN 651I am on my way to give a lecture on theHolocaust, when I comeacross the pastoral scene.What am I doing, I askmyself. How can Italk about suchmatters, here? I cannot reconcile scenes like thiswith

others I know about.In a fleetingmontage I see or dream I see the green, cursed fieldsatAuschwitz. A cold calm has settled on them. The blood does notcry from the ground. Yet no place, no wood, meadow, sylvan scenewill now be the same.17

For me this scene resonated, the moment I read it,with the Boy ofWinander, the silence of the children linking up somehow with your owngoing off

to aHolocaust lecture. The pastoral scene has a pause in ithere,too. There's something about the movement from that earlier pastoralscene of you in England, to thismoment of you as a lecturer on theHolocaust, coming across a pastoral scene, that strikesme, since it ismediated via a scene fromWordsworth, which has been a focus of yourown reading. I'm wondering if there's any comment you'd like tomakeon thispeculiar itineraryforyou inyour career and in your life.Have youreflected on it at all?GH: You're right in crossing from that autobiographical sketch tomyinterest in the interrupted pastoral. I suppose it shows how drawn I am toresilience. Think of the children. And also to the resilience of the pastoralmoment itself And the idea, which is literal, or close to literal in

Wordsworth, of rural nature as a shield, as giving some relief, a new chance,or a renewed chance of recovery. But the Holocaust was so traumatic, sointerruptive an event, that, as you know well, because you've written aboutsuch experiences, it exists unintegrated alongside normal memories. So thatnot only is the pastoral interrupted, but you have a juxtaposition thatprobably can't be resolved. I'm reminded of Charlotte Delbo, who says (Iparaphrase), "It's not right to ask how do I live with Auschwitz: I livealongside of Auschwitz. " There it is still, a complete memory. It's not thatI have a problem, because Iwant to integrate thatmemory. There is nochance of that:my Auschwitz place is here and my ordinary place, orpost-Auschwitz self is here. And the survivor has to live on like that.CC: Do you think that "alongside," or a reading ofthat alongside, couldhave been found already inWordsworth, or is it precisely somethingalongside theWordsworth for you? In other words, do you think yourWordsworth reading has prepared you for thinking about that, or is itrather thatnow you have to put something alongside your other reading?

17- "Introduction: Darkness Visible" inHolocaust Remembrance: The Shapes ofMemory, ed.Geoffrey H. Hartman (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994).


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652 CATHY CARUTHGH: That would return us to a discussion of how trauma shows itself in

Wordsworth or Uterature generaUy?and whether trauma can ever be"integrated." As tomy personal case, please remember that since I did not

myself pass through the fuUextent of coUective trauma (Iwas not deportedand in a camp), the sense, or recovery of the sense of trauma comes late.I suspect thatmy EngUsh countryside experience andWordsworth's poetryconverged, or helped me to think about, to articulate, whatever personaltrauma there was. And that the much more severe issue of coUectivetrauma,which afteraUwas notmy case, did not become an issue tillmuchlater st?l.CC: When you were commenting onWordsworth, and specificaUy on thepause, you said that there could have been something traumatic earUer, andin your pastoral, therewas something earUer (your leaving Germany alonewithout your parents), andmaybe partly that iswhat is emerging now. Thepastoral scene wasn't your first experience, it came later.GH: It is hard to saywhat came first,what came later.And knowledgealways seems to be acquired knowledge. But to whatever my consciousnessof theHolocaust speaks, it's shock has grown on me. Yes, that happenstoo. It's not just thatyou startwith shock and then trytomove away fromthe shock, or to absorb or integrate it.There are timeswhen the shockgrows on you and becomes more severe.

An Interview With Hartman

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