Cathy Caruth – “The Wound and the Voice”
From Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996)
1. Trauma as a Paradoxical Event
At the heart of Caruth’s essay is a central paradox: trauma is both a fully real experience and one that is not immediately comprehended. It is a wound to the psyche that occurs not only because of the violence or threat of death, but also because it is not assimilated when it happens. Trauma thus exists in a temporal delay—it is experienced too soon to be fully known and too late to be integrated in a conventional narrative of experience.
Caruth draws heavily on Freud’s notion of Nachträglichkeit (deferred action), particularly from Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), where he observes that victims of traumatic events often do not suffer immediately, but only later, through symptoms like flashbacks, nightmares, or repetitive behavior. Caruth reinterprets this not just as repression or delay, but as a structural impossibility of knowing trauma when it happens.
“The impact of the traumatic event lies precisely in its belatedness, in its refusal to be simply located.”
2. The Double Wound
Caruth introduces the idea of trauma as a "double wound":
- The first wound is the traumatic event itself.
- The second wound is the return of the event in the form of symptoms—unbidden, intrusive, and often incomprehensible.
This second wound marks trauma as more than just a past injury. It is a continual act of being re-wounded by the return of what was never fully experienced in the first place. Trauma is not just an event in the past, but an ongoing event in the present.
3. The Story of Tancred and Clorinda: Trauma as Repetition and Revelation
A central literary example Caruth uses is Freud’s interpretation of Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata. In this epic, the knight Tancred unknowingly kills his beloved Clorinda during battle. Later, he enters a magical forest and strikes a tree, which bleeds and speaks with Clorinda’s voice, revealing that he has wounded her again.
Freud uses this to illustrate repetition compulsion. But Caruth emphasizes not only repetition, but the emergence of a voice from the wound. The wound does not just bleed; it speaks. This voice is:
- Unexpected
- Outside the subject’s conscious knowledge
- A demand for listening, not mastery
“What returns in the wound is not only the reality of the violent event, but the voice that can no longer be shut out.”
4. The Voice of the Other and the Ethics of Listening
Caruth suggests trauma is also an encounter with the other. The voice that emerges from the wound is often not one's own, but the voice of someone silenced—dead, disappeared, or forgotten. This adds an ethical dimension to trauma: to listen to what we cannot fully understand.
This aligns trauma with psychoanalysis and literature, both of which involve attentive listening to what escapes mastery.
5. Literature, Psychoanalysis, and the Language of Trauma
Caruth argues that literature and psychoanalysis are ideal forms to confront trauma because they engage:
- Fragmentation
- Delayed understanding
- Repetition
- Silences and narrative gaps
She calls for a “literary mode of listening” — not to interpret or resolve trauma, but to allow it to speak.
6. Trauma, Death, and Survival
Caruth poses a haunting question: Is trauma the encounter with death, or the unbearable experience of surviving it?
She frames trauma as the experience of survival — living in the shadow of a death that did not occur, haunted by its possibility and its repetition.
“The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess.”
7. Conclusion: The Wound That Calls
“The Wound and the Voice” is a meditation on the limits of knowledge, the ethics of listening, and the unique capacity of literature to bear witness to a history that is never fully ours, and to voices that are never fully our own.
Caruth calls for ethical openness: to bear witness to trauma is to respond to the voice that calls from the wound, even when we do not understand it.
Key Theoretical Implications
- Trauma disrupts linear historical time and classical narrative structure.
- It creates an epistemological rupture between knowing and experiencing.
- Literature becomes a site where the “unspeakable” can speak.
- Psychoanalysis becomes a practice of listening rather than curing.
- The ethical task is not mastery, but witness and response.
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