Reading Traumatized Bodies of Text: Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School and Selah Saterstrom's the Pink Institution (Critical Essay‪)‬

Introduction: "The obscenity of the very project of understanding" Psychologists and literary theorists have used countless terms and phrases to attempt an articulation of the collapse of normal, linear understanding that ensues during and after traumatic events. Trauma scholar Cathy Caruth calls the narration of trauma an "impossible saying" (9). Literary theorist Shoshana Felman, in an exploration of Camus' The Fall, writes that traumatic events provoke a "disintegration of narrative" (171); and in her essay "Education and Crisis" she claims that traumatic events are those which happen "in excess of our frames of reference" (16). Theorist Maurice Blanchot states: "The disaster ... is what escapes the very possibility of experience--it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes" (7). Claude Lanzmann, creator of the landmark Holocaust film Shoah, calls the task of representing trauma "the obscenity of the very project of understanding" (205). It has become clear that one of the hallmarks of psychological trauma is its inability to be contained within conventional linguistic and narrative structures. Trauma takes place precisely when our ordinary narrative abilities fail us--when an event not only goes beyond, but actually destroys, our schematic understandings of the world, disabling our ability to create and trust the stories, categories, and time-space delineations necessary for normal functioning. To experience trauma is to experience a world in which annihilation of the body and self is, potentially, always immanent; a world in which the body and self are always, potentially, unsafe; a world that is ultimately incomprehensible.