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150 Matt Tierney

Abstract (E): In their most repetitive moments, literature and film can help us respond to common critical assumptions about the temporality of trauma. Rather than posit trauma's latency, anteriority, or unrepresentability, I raise questions about its obviousness, interchangeability, and cliché. Moving past trauma theory, and into general questions about repetition and representation, I therefore turn to a phrase that has often been repeated in texts across a range of forms and genres: "Oh no, not again!"

Abstract (F): Lorsqu‟ils se font intensément répétitifs, cinéma et littérature peuvent nous aider à revoir certaines hypothèses sur la temporalité du trauma. Plutôt que de revenir une fois de plus sur la latence, l‟antériorité ou la non-représentabilité du trauma, je voudrais me pencher plutôt sur son caractère évident, interchangeable, stéréotypé. Afin de dépasser les théories existantes et poser de nouvelles questions sur les phénomènes de répétition et de représentation traumatiques, je voudrais pour cela examiner ici plus en détail une phrase qu‟on n‟a cessé de répéter dans une grande diversité de formes et de genres : « Oh non, pas encore ! ». Keywords: Repetition | Representability | Affect | Trauma | Lolita

I.APROTEST FOR PROTEST‟S SAKE

In the 2005 film The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the protagonist Arthur Dent saves his spaceship from two speeding nuclear missiles by triggering the craft‟s mysterious Infinite Improbability Drive. With the push of a button, Arthur discovers that he has spontaneously transformed the missiles into a pair of unlikely objects—a whale and a bowl of petunias—now both plummeting toward the surface of a nearby planet. Each of these two objects offers a different verbal response to its sudden confrontation with real disaster; and each response allegorizes an important theoretical perspective on the question of whether or not such traumatic reality can be represented through brute mediation by cinematic image and sound.1

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A brief comment on my essay‟s approach to film and literary dialogue: It is common practice to read lines spoken by characters primarily as expressions of character psychology, or else as secondary and affectively neutral effects of a mechanical apparatus upon a spectator‟s or reader‟s state of mind. Somewhat idiosyncratically, I set both of these psychological perspectives aside, and treat dialogue instead at the juncture of a film‟s or novel‟s technique, its affect, and its cultural history. From this perspective, dialogue—in film as in fiction—is an especially legible

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The falling objects appear on screen, together and then one at a time: first the whale, which, as a narrator points out, has “had very little time to come to terms with its identity.” The whale begins by asking itself earnestly “who am I?” and “why am I here?” and ends by asking about the rapidly approaching earth: “what‟s this thing suddenly coming toward me very fast?” Even after the whale has hit ground, died, and burst violently apart, these straightforward questions still have revealed nothing about the whale‟s identity, and nothing about its present crisis. When the bowl of petunias falls next, however, it asks no questions at all, and attempts no explanations. Instead of meditations on its own spontaneous and doomed existence, says the narrator, “the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias was Oh no, not

again.” Seen in light of current debates about trauma, we might say that the whale has attempted

a direct address to the circumstances of its own death; that its questions aim to resolve a problem that it might as well acknowledge is unresolvable (its death by falling); and that the whale thus echoes those theorists who would say that a trauma cannot ever be presented by a screen or page, but will commandeer all our interrogatory language about film or literature, nevertheless. The bowl of petunias, by contrast, can be seen to allegorize a more skeptical position: one that does not find the traumatic event to be sacred or unspeakable, but instead sees reverberating from it a symbolic ripple-effect—alarming, repeated, futile, and enigmatic, all at the same time—with the words: “Oh no, not again.”2

Put another way, the opposition recalled is between the theorists who see trauma as unable to enter into material experience through representation; and the ones for whom trauma is nothing other what are taken to be its concrete but secondary effects.

particle of a textual whole, with implications both for spectators and for characters, but situated properly speaking at the precarious and impersonal site of textual analysis, or reading. So while character speech may indeed express something psychological, I am more concerned with its modes of expression than with any kind of diegetic interior. And while such speech may invite the identification by a reader or viewer, I am more concerned with the style of invitation address than with any responsive outside.

2

The opposition between the whale and the bowl of petunias resembles (if only obliquely) a familiar model in the still-current debates over Claude Lanzmann‟s 1985 film Shoah, and especially those contentious positions that have often been taken up by Shoshana Felman and Dominick LaCapra. On the one hand, Felman approves of Lanzmann‟s film because it recognizes that the severity and historical remoteness of the Holocaust must render its

representation impossible. Following Freud, she names Lanzmann‟s respectful practice—one that sees the event itself as inviolable and inaccessible, but understands that the filmmaker must yet do something to figure things out—in a “working through” of the original trauma, by living “life itself as the perpetual necessity...of a learning that in fact can never end” (55). On the other hand, LaCapra responds by seeing in Felman‟s work an “absolutization of trauma” that converts it into a “universal hole in Being or an unnamable Thing” without a historical context (246). Tellingly, he also takes both Felman and Lanzmann to task for having missed Freud‟s insistence that each act of “working through” is necessarily coupled with a degree of “acting out”—an “acting out” that, in this case, takes place through Felman‟s and Lanzmann‟s own

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The film‟s narrator reports that if we could only make sense of the petunias‟ strange testimony, “we would know more about the nature of the universe than we do now.” And this is the wager of the present essay: that the flowers‟ utterance can show us how language proliferates to no determined end, when it submits to disastrous conditions. This episode from The

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy might thus begin to illustrate connections between trauma and

its repetitions, as well as between reality and its representations. If the theoretical humanities usually define trauma as a kind of linguistic or mnemic failure—very often a result of historical or individual disaster—then the subdiscipline called “trauma studies” generally analyzes literary and film texts whose thematic interest is in catastrophes as diverse as Hiroshima and the Holocaust, incest and rape.3 This would seem to be no place for a comedy such as The

Hitchhiker’s Guide, which is neither intimately nor historically serious. But the petunias‟

utterance might, in fact, offer a way out of the common deadlock, wherein the whole reason that language must fail at describing reality is that reality once thoroughly damaged all of us who speak through language. Instead of this tragic origin story, what “Oh no, not again” constitutes is an enigma—apart from any narrative of damage—that carries no evident truth about reality, but only a distressed pronouncement that reality is not, in any simple spatial or temporal way, “out there” for us to (successfully or unsuccessfully) represent, either truthfully or not.

“Oh no, not again” is thus a conundrum that we might endlessly fail to translate. Is the bowl of petunias remembering or working through a traumatic moment that took place earlier in the story? No, the flowers‟ sudden appearance is a unique event, without a precedent (in spite of the film‟s repetition not just of generic codes, but also of the many novels, television programs, radio shows, and comic books that all previously bore the Hitchhiker’s Guide title and story). The petunias‟ outcry conjures the specter of a recurrence only to refuse it, and thus marks a repetition without an originating act or trauma. Like any enigmatic utterance, however, the

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A pair of recent books that point most forcefully to the recent advances in cultural and film studies of trauma—E. Ann Kaplan‟s Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in

Media and Literature, and Janet Walker‟s Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the

Holocaust—also repeat the broad critical tendency to take a wide range of human catastrophes as

all constituting “trauma,” and thus all necessitating a common theory. It is Walker‟s book that most explicitly brings together such drastically different traumatic circumstances, arguing first, that both incest and the Holocaust mark a collapse of public with private spheres, because even “the Holocaust is peopled by individuals whose family life and life itself the Nazis sought to extinguish”; and second, that “both incest and the Holocaust have been discussed as events that lack witnesses” (xx).

Yet Kaplan‟s book can also be seen to make the universalizing gesture, if only because the whole of her book—and all the terrors it addresses—constitutes her attempt to manage her own intimate response to the events of 11 September, about which she argues: “we have begun to translate the trauma into a language of acceptance while deliberately keeping the wound open; we are learning to mourn what happened, bear witness to it, and yet move forward” (147). In her effort to “keep the wound open,” Kaplan directs our attention to cinematic responses to events as diverse as the genocides in Australia (via Werner Herzog‟s 1984 Where the Green Ants Dream) and North America (via Kevin Costner‟s 1990 Dances with Wolves).

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petunias‟ words invite us to decode them, to locate an origin where there is none, and to imagine their code as a key to the “nature of the universe” even if we do not quite believe that such a key exists. The experience resembles the extraordinarily difficult feeling of “emptiness” that D.W. Winnicott describes in his last work:

It is easier for a patient to remember trauma than to remember nothing happening when it might have happened. At the time, the patient did not know what might have happened, and so could not experience anything except to note that something might have been. (106)

Now “Oh no, not again” is a textual puzzle rather than a clinical one, but it bears the same ambiguous temporality and equivocal relation to fact—the urgent sense of a pressing “might have been”—that so troubles Winnicott‟s patient. Absurd as a statement of fact (“I am not falling again”) and seemingly pointless as the declaration of a desire (“I wish that I were not falling again”), the petunias‟ utterance can only be heard once all hope is lost. This utterance, in which “nothing happened when it might have happened,” remains thick with feeling and meaning. It is a protest for the sake of protest.

II.AN UNARGUED REMNANT

For Slavoj Žižek, our everyday, apparently well-managed language is always marked by the regular irruption of something traumatic that is disruptive of, and in, language. And one of his favorite examples of this incursion is a scene from Ridley Scott‟s 1979 film Alien. In this scene, John Hurt‟s character lies supine on his spaceship‟s dining table, and the terrible title beast explodes fiercely from his chest before slithering out of the room. Žižek calls this creature Hurt‟s “externalized wound” that “on a strictly symbolic level does not exist at all” (The Sublime

Object of Ideology 79). The question of just what this creature is then leads Žižek to name it “the

incarnation of impossible jouissance” and “the pre-Symbolic maternal Thing, par excellence” (132). On this view, trauma appears beyond the edge of representability and language: the alien‟s sudden appearance demands a profound affective response, and then a critical apparatus appears that will explain to us just what all of our affect means. We might see in Žižek‟s argument an approach to trauma like that of the whale in The Hitchhiker’s Guide: he asks persistent questions and makes ontological claims about something that would seem not even to “exist at all”: a reality that would burst into representation as the raw matter of unrepresentability. In some film-scholarly circles, Žižek‟s pronouncement about Alien has been dismissed. When Žižek equates the alien with an unrepresentable Thing, the argument goes, he ignores the fact that the alien is, precisely, represented. And when he argues that the alien “does not exist” symbolically, he ignores its place in the sound and image track, its position in the narrative, and its very constructedness at the hands of special-effects technicians.

These criticisms follow a more general claim about Žižek‟s practice, throughout his work, of rifling through culture for “examples” that he supposedly then mistreats, doing a disservice to his own theory in the process. (Emphasizing this latter aspect, for example, Tim

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Dean has pointed out Žižek‟s tendency to substitute “by way of explanation, very concrete instances for highly abstract ideas” (26).) I think, however, that such a counter-argument misses the point. While Žižek is wrong to locate the unrepresentable Thing in a film‟s representation of a trauma, his detractors are likewise wrong to reify a primal, unshown field—whether of trauma or of cinema‟s invisible off-screen reverse field. The alien in Alien irrupts neither as a simple artifice that is internal to the film, nor as a disastrous trauma that is external to the film. Indeed, the alien appears inside the film, as the very effect of a filmic outside, and as the very possibility that a film might succeed at both containing and overwhelming itself, at the same time. In other words, the beast disturbs us not because it is immaterial but, precisely, because it coheres as the semblance of immateriality through wholly material means.

Among film-theoretical reactions to Žižek‟s encounter with Alien, the most sophisticated and sympathetic has come from Stephen Heath, for whom the episode crystallizes Žižek‟s tendency to theorize cinema “not as the vehicle of an exposition but as a matter of experience, on the edge of the real” (38). Heath continues: “The significantly original aspect of Žižek‟s work, beyond the brilliance of his conjunction of concepts and films…[is] the creation of something else again, „Žižek-film,‟ but which perhaps depends exactly on a specific situation: that of the theorist” (45). For Heath, what Žižek produces is not a descriptive commentary about a film, but rather a new object, a “Žižek-film”—a unique and situational object produced from the conjunction of theory and film. Indeed, Žižek makes this argument himself, when he claims that his practice remains “much more faithful to the interpreted work than any superficial respect for the work‟s unfathomable autonomy,” simply because of his willingness to say pretty much anything “in order to accomplish the work of Theory” (The Fright of Real Tears 9, Žižek‟s emphasis). Yet, one must ask, what happens to the “film itself” when either theoretical or cinematic underpinnings of the “Žižek-film” can come to be reformulated?

From a scene in Mel Brooks‟s 1987 film Spaceballs that again features the actor John Hurt, we may arrive at such a reformulation. In Spaceballs, Hurt‟s character repeats his famous collapse, this time on a counter in an outer-space diner. As Hurt lies there supine, the alien emerges from his chest once more. It opens its mouth wide in close-up, as if to show just how fearsome it still is. But then it dons a straw hat, picks up a tiny cane, and sings a tune (whose lyrics are “hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal”) from the 1955 Warner Brothers cartoon, One Froggy Evening. But just before the song and dance, Hurt‟s character raises his head to confront death. He looks straight at the beast and groans: “Oh no, not again.”

In a sense, the film is merely reminding its spectators that it is aware of just how it is that parody works. What better way to announce its unpayable debts to space-horror and cartoon-comedy than for Spaceballs to repeat elements from a major work from each genre, in the same utterance by which it itself admits of repetition and the failures to repeat? Parody might not be so tidily referential, however. If Fredric Jameson is correct about parody—that with the postmodern disappearance of “any linguistic norm in terms of which one could ridicule private languages and idiosyncratic styles” we are left not only without parodied referents, but also with “nothing but stylistic diversity and heterogeneity”—then John Hurt‟s remark can point, not just at the texts

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that the film explicitly satirizes (Alien and One Froggy Evening) but also to a whole web of heterogeneous cultural objects that are linked only by an instantly recognizable, if hardly-legible, phrase (114). So just as with the bowl of petunias, the character‟s protest comes too late for rescue—“Oh no, not again” is little more than a moot demonstration of displeasure. There is nothing which has happened before that can be remembered here, and there is nothing impossible about this alien: the “before” is the “before” of an entirely different movie (Alien, not

Spaceballs). And when the monster emerges, it does so as an object even more artificial

(comedic not horrific; lower budget; less “real”) than the presumed original. But what the scene from Spaceballs suggests is that the creature‟s emergence—in both films—is not only repeated but also endlessly repeatable: as legible and as readily assimilated as any stimulus.

What might not be so fully assimilable, however, is Hurt‟s utterance. With his own “Oh no, not again,” Hurt has told us too much. In its semiotic abundance and semantic poverty, the phrase causes a confusion and demands a continuous translation. It oscillates back and forth between two impossible options: from the implausible protest (“let me not die again, as I died before”) to the unlikely statement of fact (“this thing which is not happening has happened before”). Such an oscillation might again remind us of Winnicott‟s “emptiness,” or else of Freud‟s fort-da game, in which a child animates a spool, and thereby initiates a dynamic of simultaneous self-destruction and self-preservation. For Freud, this dynamic promises, for as long as it functions, to distract the child from his mother‟s devastating absence just as it pledges to shield him from the disastrous risk of her unmediated presence.4 For the reading of a film, by extension, just as the child establishes and then maintains a tenuous hold on his environment, the cinema builds an environment that it then supports through technical means.5 Cinema thus protects itself from the incursions of reality, paradoxically, by hypothesizing a reality that is absolutely outside of its capacity to reproduce.

Thought in this way, nothing devastating or damaging will ever emerge out from the movie screen. Instead, it is our encounter with cinema that proves our continued ability to encounter the range of other modern stimuli. After all, Freud argues that the child‟s self-preservation stems from his insistence that an unmasterable space might somehow, in the end, be controlled. We might take this view a step further, and suggest that cinema‟s most profound shocks are its ways of testing boundaries, celebrating them, and rendering them safe. The phrase “Oh no, not again” might thus show the threat of repetition to be the threat of limitlessness—the danger that there never was an absolute outside, but only an utterance, quavering at the edge. As such, “Oh no, not again” atemporalizes death (or at least the deaths of Hurt‟s characters and of

4

One might argue, as Walter Benjamin has, that modernity has produced a range of technologies by which we remain similarly on guard. For an optimistic Benjamin, Freud‟s repetition “is not only the way to master frightening fundamental experiences…[but] also means enjoying one‟s victories and triumphs over and over again, with total intensity” (120).

5

In a similar claim, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis has argued that, in cinema, “the drive operates and, at the end of its thought operations, it flashes through the image; it makes a sign, it does not make an image” (xvii).

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the petunias) and renders it ambiguously spatial, always refusing the transcendent or nostalgic motifs of anteriority or return: “not again.”

And yet the oscillation that springs from trauma, for Freud, is still temporal as well as spatial. As early as the 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology, Freud famously recounts the case of Emma, a young woman whose “compulsion not to go into shops alone” first inspires him to formulate his theory of Nachträglichkeit, or deferred action (410). In her sessions, Emma reveals to Freud two possible sources for her hysterical symptom: first, an experience at age twelve, in which she had sensed two shop-assistants “laughing at her for her clothes”; and second, a moment at age eight, when she had been attacked by a third man, a shop-keeper who had grabbed her “through her clothes” (410-11). Freud calls the chronologically later experience

Scene I because it is the first to be recounted, and because it is both the occasion and the vehicle

for her recollection of the anterior moment, which he calls Scene II. The second (but earlier) scene appears as the trigger of the first, but also as an effect of its narration—Emma remembers it and gives it significance only once she has told Freud about Scene I. The scenes are linked by a pair of significant elements: first, the sexual excitement remembered from Scene I and afterwards imputed to Scene II; and second, the word clothes, which repeats from one narrative to the next. In tracking these two elements, Freud builds a history of the subject that relies not on the steady or predictable origins of her trauma, but rather on the temporally ambivalent processes of reconstruction and recollection, by which “a memory is repressed which has only become a trauma after the event” (413, Freud‟s emphasis).

But just as “Oh no, not again” insists on a spatiality that has neither an inside nor an outside, it also demands that we emphasize a moment in time that has neither a before nor an after—not Scene II as if it were once lost but later recoverable, but Scene I in all its terrible, unreadable presence. The phrase “Oh no, not again,” in this way has characteristics of what Jean-François Lyotard, in his critique of Freud‟s Emma scenario, called the phrase-affect: an integral and violent disturbance of the representational field, the very “nonphysical name of excitability” (“Emma” 44). For Lyotard, Freud‟s failure is in seeking the source of Emma‟s anxiety rather than attending to the symbolic aspects of her current protest, the refusal to “go into shops alone.” The noise of this protest, Lyotard argues, is both the condition and the interruption of Emma‟s speech. This noise or affect thus guarantees the claim of language on unmediated expression. But it lurks in the midst of a language both as the impossible ideal of its articulation—it is “neither referential nor addressed”—and as the impossibility of articulating any ideal (38).

Importantly, it is not that the affect hides beneath the manifest veneer of a word, an emotion, or any other form of representation. Rather, for Lyotard, representation is an ongoing process of transcription—strictly speaking, neither a space nor a time but instead the substrate and disruption of both—and the affect is what gets transcribed. Moreover, the affect does not stand external to representation as if it could surface in the form of a compromise. “Discourse,” Lyotard writes, “only appears to be able to support an unarticulated and unargued remnant remaining outside its grasp” (“The Phrase-Affect” 236). This theory thus offers a way of describing the outward reach of a discourse without positing any exterior to that discourse. And

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through this theory we might see representations (cinematic, literary, or otherwise) to be degraded transcriptions of the inarticulable phrases that make them up. As a phrase that disarticulates in the very process of its articulation, “Oh no, not again” forces us to think about

excess as the appearance of, rather than an incursion from, some thing spatially exterior, or

temporally anterior.

Žižek has addressed what he calls this “temporal loop” of trauma, arguing: “If we try to grasp the trauma directly, irrespective of its later effects, we are left with a meaningless factum

brutum...It is only through its echoes within the symbolic structure that the factum brutum...retroactively acquires its traumatic character” (Metastases 32). But it is Lyotard‟s

concept that allows us to locate a materialism of trauma that has nothing to do with the deduction of an original cause or site—factum brutum or no—but has everything to do with the ambiguous stuff of language: the overabundance of bare voice. When Žižek insists that the alien (in Alien) is the Thing, he ends up ignoring the temporal loop, and giving a legible and meaningful form to the factum brutum. What Lyotard insists, by contrast, is that the signifier is all we have; and that repetition, retroactivity, and meaninglessness are what make up that signifier‟s affective matrix. When Žižek grasps at the alien as the original, pre-Symbolic, and traumatic “Thing,” he thus effects a kind of restoration, of supposedly lost meaning, anteriority, and exteriority. The utterance of John Hurt and of the bowl of petunias provides a corrective to this, by demanding we see the only mark of trauma to be one that speaks of itself as such—not as an event of failed representation, but as an affect of failure that is both constitutive and thoroughgoing—and that can speak of nothing else.

III.AQUALITY OF BEING REAL

Jennifer Todd Reeves‟s 1996 experimental film Chronic bears such an affect. This film depicts the childhood traumas of a young woman named Gretchen (played by Reeves), a teenager who relocates to “a college town,” becomes extremely lonely, begins to cut herself, and is eventually confined to a mental hospital. After the first color sequence—a pair of image-tracks, distressed celluloid of abstract fast-moving shapes, overlapped in a double exposure—a third-person narrator (also Reeves) describes the central drama of the film: Gretchen‟s rape at a fraternity party and her subsequent abandonment on her parents‟ lawn. A series of obscured architectural spaces, in blue and black, reveal a barnyard fire and a burnt-out rural home. A new and paler color irrupts into the field while these spaces continue to drift and smolder: a blot of orange and brown that is soon recognizable as a pair of hands washing in a sink. The first image series shifts to a view of trees through a second-story window, while the orange blot resolves as well, into a bruised human arm that has been marred by cuts and scratches, and that extends like a wide, pale stripe through the center of the screen. The pointed edge of a gray object, likely a knife, briefly enters the top of the frame. The film cuts to black, and to a title card that reads: “gretchen started off high school on the wrong foot.”

Gretchen‟s bodily damage and psychological dislocation are thus established through a set of images that have themselves been tortured and abstracted. Her scars and confusion are

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echoed on screen, certainly, but even the cinematic cut itself—that fundamental division between film segments—is exposed as both a necessary caesura and a violent act. Reeves has argued that her film establishes “a parallel between the surface and texture of the film and Gretchen‟s „surface,‟ her shell, her skin” and that each of her various special effects “juxtaposes the present with the past, and fantasy and obsession with reality” (339). For Reeves, there is a futility that marks the representation of trauma, and it is this futility that Chronic aims to foreground—not by excluding it, but by embodying it. After the title card, therefore, a narrator‟s voiceover (“When Gretchen was fourteen, she really wanted to be liked, and she‟d heard fraternity parties were the thing to do.”) hovers above a black-and-white still image of a fully dressed woman lying on grass. The image flickers with its negative, and then cuts in to a close-up before a second title card appears: “2 frat boys make a delivery in the wee hours of the morning.”

A man‟s voice now provides the narration, as all objects in the frame—a car, trees, and a house—are reduced to their thinnest white borders, their barest outlines on a film that has been scratched and distressed until it resembles a textile, like denim:

There‟s pussy all around. That chick‟s so fucked up, she won‟t know any better. Now look, this chick gets fucked up. And in the meantime she passes out, and I‟m like okay, that‟s cool. And we‟re like fucking with this chick, and we wake her up. So they get out of there, and I slap the helmet on and take care of business. And then the girl wakes up in the morning, and I‟m sitting next to her. And she‟s wearing this miniskirt hiked up to here, and her underwear is down to her ankles. And she looks at me, she looks at the situation, and she says: „Oh no, not again.‟

The segment ends when the voiceover has devolved into the rumbling group laughter and profanity of men, and the screen has returned us to the woman from the previous scene, lying on the grass. A pair of hands tying her scarf is revealed, in a reverse shot, to belong to one of two men—identifiable only by the white lips of baseball caps that interrupt the inky background. And the original narrator returns: “That morning when she awoke on the lawn, she was in horrible pain which told her she was no longer a virgin.”

There is no depth to these figures on the screen. There is no illusion of interiority, and little intimation of authenticity: only two dimensions, as Reeves says, like skin or like a shell. And there are only two tones: the black of a field, and the white edges that slice through it. It is not a stored memory that reveals to Gretchen what has just happened—it is the pain of a physical wound. The only anchor to social and cinematic convention, at this point, is the final cliché from the male narrator, “Oh no, not again.” Yet even this slim line of familiarity is dislodged, when Reeves admits in an interview that the film‟s “themes are autobiographical and a few anecdotes are true,” but insists nevertheless that “Chronic is more fiction than non-fiction” (336). This tension between fiction and non-fiction is unsurprising, given that the film adopts a confessional mode and then leaves all the confessing to its sympathetic narrator, rather than to its largely silent protagonist. Yet Reeves‟s conclusion that her film is “more fiction” becomes troubled by the revelation that “some of the original footage was shot up to six years earlier as a kind of

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diary” including the images of what she calls Gretchen‟s and her own “self-injury” (339). She explains: “At the time I didn‟t know why I was shooting it, but just felt that I had to document what I was doing to myself” (339).

The tangle of fiction and reality is thus knotted to a second tangle, involving two kinds of autobiography—the kind that emerges in a diary film, and the kind that emerges in an interview about that film. Moreover, Reeves remarks: “All the audio from that scene is taken from a real frat house gathering. I obtained the audio from a friend who videotaped a graduation dinner when he was a member of that fraternity…This gives the film a quality of being real, even though it‟s a fiction.” (338-9, my emphasis). Here is, in fact, another irony: not merely that the distilled artifice of “Oh no, not again” is what gives the film its “quality of being real,” but also that this artificial phrase is in fact the only instance on the film‟s soundtrack that can be said to document a reality, in an actual, not a re-enacted fraternity party. The utterance and its “real quality” will occur only when, either through the disjunctive logic of “not again” or through the confessions of the filmmaker, we realize that two rapes have occurred rather than one: that of Gretchen, as well as the one referred to in the fraternity boy‟s boasting. In other words, the disaster of reality only makes itself felt by way of an excess of words from an extraneous source, in a moment characterized by both generic familiarity and extreme disorientation.

This is not to conclude about Chronic as Laura U. Marks has, that by having “cut her own arms and shed real blood,” Reeves cures us of “the poststructuralist disease that would have us believe our own bodies are just textual objects and don‟t really exist” (207-8). On the contrary, what Chronic produces through its artifice is a simultaneity of opposites: a refusal of any inside to the image or the trauma, both film and the flesh having become wholly surface; and the survival, on this surface, of both interiority and exteriority as its untired effects.6 Jennifer Reeves has said of Chronic: “Even though I include a traumatic event that had a profound effect on Gretchen (the gang rape), I try to show, from the beginning of the film, that she was already in a dangerous cycle before she went to the fraternity party” (338). With the line “Oh no, not again,” Chronic has forced together a pair of traumas—the attack on Gretchen and the attack narrated in the fraternity boy‟s testimony—but it awards neither one the status of explanation or origin. Gretchen was “already in a disturbing cycle,” a process that is more oscillating and elliptical than it is linear. Each catastrophic event in Gretchen‟s life (and the film narrates several

6

It is the potential banality of a trauma, as well as its repetitions, that as often as not makes trauma so difficult to narrate. We might find paradigmatic of this tendency Kenneth Burke‟s anecdote, in Permanence and Change, about a child with a terrified response (his Scene I, so to speak) to the shadows of a coat rack in the corner of a bedroom. For Burke, there is little

therapeutic value in attempting to name what cannot be named, an originating event or stimulus. Rather, he says: “One casts out demons…by an incongruous naming, by calling them the very

thing in all the world they are not: old coats” (133). It might or might not be pushing the point to

identify these “old coats” of Burke‟s with the signifier “clothes” that pursues Freud through his treatment of Emma, but that he ultimately sets aside in favor of the more seductive secrets of her earlier sexual excitement.

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of them) behaves as if it were a repetition, when in fact its very singularity derives from its never having happened before.

This fact denotes half of the force exerted by “Oh no, not again” in Chronic. The other half is exerted neither by Gretchen nor by Reeves, but by the film itself, in its genre play (the reproduction of intimately familiar melodramatic scenes that become joltingly unfamiliar) and in its physicality. The work of this film is something like what André Green has called “body-writing,” a form of cultural production through which “representation no longer lays the foundation of a structured fantasy” but instead “becomes fragmented into short-lived, evanescent bodily states” (31). With its distressed and contorted celluloid, the bodily state of Chronic may resemble that of Gretchen, Reeves, or the woman in the fraternity boy‟s story. But from the standpoint of its effects upon affect or knowledge, the film exceeds anything that could be accomplished by a narrative, or by a filmmaker‟s deliberate manipulations of her camera and optical printer. Green continues:

The writer fail[s] repeatedly to communicate through the writing process this uncommunicable reality because neither the spoken nor the written word can yield a rendering of it. The affect is not even any longer the object of the writing process…The new object is the state of the body proper in its most violent manifestation…[and] a short circuit occurs between body and thought, which makes thought a corporal organ. (31, my emphasis)

This film includes few words either written or spoken, but like the body-writing which Green describes, Chronic disrupts the whole epistemology of trauma—not by displacing a practice of theory (as Marks would have it) but rather by entering its own body, violently, into an active corpus of thought.

IV.AGRAY FURRY QUESTION MARK

The knottiest case for the importance of “Oh no, not again” may be Vladimir Nabokov‟s novel and screenplay, Lolita, as well as the pair of films adapted from them. 7 Unlike the films‟ talkative title characters, the novel‟s Lolita is rarely found to speak, lest she disturb Humbert Humbert‟s first-person narrative. As the reflecting surface for Humbert‟s nostalgic fantasies, Lolita can hardly be allowed speech. Yet toward the middle of the narrative, she offers a single, ambivalent line of refusal, albeit mediated by Humbert Humbert‟s narration:

7

To be sure, one might also consider the utterance from the clinical point of view of object relations, for which every trauma is first and always a repetition. Michael Eigen for instance, in a discussion of his patient Annette, has described what he calls her “just-as” experience. Troubled by Annette‟s refusal to describe traumatic episodes directly, Eigen determines that, as far as she was concerned, “just as she was starting to be a person, express herself, communicate, make use of” her analysis, she would convince herself that he had abandoned her. She would then emit a protest, the very site of her trauma, that had to be understood as both “dramatic and tragic, „Oh shucks!‟ or „Damn!‟ or „Just missed!‟ or „Oh no, not again!‟” (181)

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Sometimes…Come on, how often exactly, Bert? Can you recall four, five, more such occasions? Or would no human heart have survived two or three? Sometimes (I have nothing to say in reply to your question), while Lolita would be haphazardly preparing her homework, sucking a pencil, lolling sideways in an easy chair with both legs over its arm, I would shed all my pedagogic restraint, dismiss all our quarrels, forget all my masculine pride—and literally crawl on my knees to your chair, my Lolita! You would give me one look—a gray furry question mark of a look: „Oh no, not again.‟ (192)

Humbert, our protagonist and narrator, at this point addresses a tortured question to someone named “Bert.” How often, Humbert asks Bert, has twelve-year-old Dolores Haze refused his advances? The novel contains no character whom Humbert could be addressing as “Bert” (one so-named character—a “film photographer” who “too, had some psychic troubles”—had appeared as early as page 33, but then then he vanishes again on the same page). So it seems that “Bert” is no one but Humbert himself, and Humbert has asked Bert a question, to which Bert will “have nothing to say.” Bert would rather reminisce about one of the many slow afternoons on which he approached Lolita with his eager plea.

But the address shifts at this point. Suddenly, Bert (or perhaps Humbert) has begun to apostrophize Lolita herself (“my Lolita!”), who has become a second-person addressee rather than a third-person reference, and whose “one look” tells Bert: “Oh no, not again.” In this passage, all of the divisions among characters become opaque and incoherent. Humbert splits into two people who conduct a contentious dialogue, but then he speaks suddenly as only one (or the other, or both) of these personalities in order to address Lolita. For her part, Lolita is made indistinguishable from her actions. When the narrator tells us that she is “lolling sideways,” he assigns her a new name, to follow her famed appellations: “Lo in the morning,” “Lola in slacks,” “Dolly at school,” and “Dolores on the dotted line” (9). It may be that “in my arms, she was always Lolita,” but before she can become Lolita, she must first loll—in a mute and lazy protest. Mute, because the only voice that we hear belongs to Humbert (or possibly Bert). It is thus only his memory, and his recounting, that can produce Lo‟s enigmatic line: “Oh no, not again.”

Why then, does the line appear attributed to Lolita in the 1961 screenplay that Nabokov himself penned? What changes must have occurred for a novelistic scene defined by its indistinct characters to become a cinematic scene, almost always intolerant of that kind of ambiguity? In this case, the profoundly indiscrete has given way to the merely indiscreet—there can be no Bert, no lolling or wordplay, and no internal debate in a film. So the affect of Lolita‟s protest has necessarily changed, both in her stage directions, and in her dialogue:

She, exasperated, bangs her fist on the piano keys and falls into an easy chair, her legs sideways over the armrest.

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You will never leave me alone, is that it?

He goes down on his knees literally crawling toward her, adumbrating an amphoric embrace, almost like a lover of yore.

LOLITA

Oh, no! Not again. (156)

What was once casual has become fierce. Lolita, no longer “furry” and quizzical, instead “bangs her fist on the piano keys” in anger. And the terminal line, once a resigned single sentence (“Oh no, not again.”) has become two sentences, split brutally apart by an exclamation point (“Oh no! Not again.”). Yet some muteness may linger from the literary Lolita. A clichéd line such as this can accomplish little as protest. It seems doomed to fail as resistance, both in practice (it will not halt Humbert‟s advance) and as rhetoric (having failed as a refusal, it retains no descriptive power either). But even as the line seems to negate Lolita‟s rebellion against Humbert, it nonetheless does something. With no way to prevent Humbert‟s approach, Lolita‟s protest is futile and false, and yet perhaps it is as genuine as protest gets. It takes place just before the fact, recognizes its own futility, and makes a noise. And the index of this noise—an exclamation point—lingers as a signifier of difference from that which purports to have come before.

Far from pessimistic, the utterance exerts an impulsive optimism in the screenplay: muttering an implausibly recalcitrant “no” (what Melville called a “No! in thunder”) and positing an ambiguity very different from the one that arises from the blurred characters in the novel‟s scene. Yet of the two film adaptations that follow—the first directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, and second directed by Adrian Lyne in 1997—both of them exclude Lolita‟s ambivalent line, along with the scene to which it had belonged. Might it then be that what persists in Nabokov‟s own screenplay adaptation as an ambiguity or muteness, continues to linger as (literally rather than literarily) mute in the films of Kubrick and Lyne? In isolation and relocation from the phrase it had punctuated, the exclamation point must alone now repeat the action of the entire line—an intrusive caesura, lending it the divisive force of a protest—as an alarming obstruction, at a grammatical limit, to test whether the meaning of the original line might survive its adaptation into another medium.8 And perhaps, of Lolita‟s “Oh no, not again,” it is this

8

Thomas Elsaesser has written that trauma characterizes all cinematic and linguistic reference, as well as to psychic functioning, and that it might come to be “the name for a referentiality that can no longer be placed (that need no longer be placed) in a particular time or place, but whose time-space-place-referentiality is nonetheless posited, in fact doubled and displaced in relation to an „event‟.” A stylistic excess marks many of the films about trauma, in these terms—an excess that might manifest in brash colors, over-the-top acting, or, say, Reeves‟s experimental techniques or an enigmatic line of dialogue—and it is this that lends them to a

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punctuation that survives the attempts at the novel‟s cinematization: as a problem for reading; as a roughness or a break in the body of a film; or as a material affect that varies and persists, demanding and denying our attention, over and over again.

WORKS CITED:

Benjamin, Walter. “Toys and Play,” in Selected Writings: Volume 2, Part 1, 1927-1930. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Burke, Kenneth. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1954.

Dean, Tim. “Art as Symptom: Žižek and the Ethics of Psychoanalytic Criticism.” Diacritics 32.2 (2002).

Eigen, Michael. “Healing Longing in the Midst of Damage.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 15 (2005).

Elsaesser, Thomas. “Postmodernism as Mourning Work.” Screen 42:2 (2001).

Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,

Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1961.

---. Project for a Scientific Psychology, in The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm

Fliess, Drafts, and Notes, 1887-1902. New York: Basic Books (1954).

Green, André. “The Unbinding Process.” New Literary History 12:1 (1980).

Heath, Stephen. “Cinema and Psychoanalysis: Parallel Histories.” Endless Night: Cinema and

Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories. Edited by Janet Bergstrom. Berkeley, CA: University

of California Press, 1999.

Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on

Postmodern Culture. Edited by Hal Foster. Port Townsent, WA: Bay Press, 1983.

generalized theory of trauma and reference. It is a stylistic excess, therefore, that comes to refer both to the unrepresentable real of a trauma and to that of a whole profilmic world.

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Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press (2005).

Lyotard, Jean-François. “Emma: Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis.” Lyotard:

Philosophy, Politics, and the Sublime. Edited by Hugh J. Silverman. New York:

Routledge, 2002.

---. “The Phrase-Affect.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 32:1 (2001). LaCapra, Dominick. “Shoah: „Here there is no Why‟.” Critical Inquiry 23:2 (1997).

Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2002).

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York: Vintage International, 1955. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita: A Screenplay. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961.

Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. “Editor‟s Preface.” The Freud Scenario by Jean-Paul Sartre. Translated by Quintin Hoare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Reeves, Jennifer Todd. “On Chronic and The Time We Killed,” in Scott MacDonald, ed. A

Critical Cinema 5. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (2006).

Walker, Janet. Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (2005).

Winnicott, D.W. “Fear of Breakdown.” International Review of Psychoanalysis 1:1 (1974). Žižek, Slavoj. The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski between Theory and Post-Theory.

London: BFI Publishing, 2001.

---. The Metastases of Enjoyment. New York: Verso Books, 1994. ---. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso Books, 1989.

Bio: Matt Tierney is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Modern Culture & Media at Brown University. Chiefly concerned with ontological and epistemological relations of American cinema to the post-war novel, his dissertation is entitled: "The Projector Rests on a Pile of Books: Forms of Void in U.S. Film and Literature." Matthew_Tierney@brown.edu

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