Sympathetic Conditions: Toward a New Ontology of Trauma

Two major critics in the emergence of the field in the early 1990s, Shoshana Felman and Cathy Caruth, argue that traumatic narrative (the telling of trauma), must be spoken in a language that permits for temporal disruption, fragmentation, violence, and the breakdown of any mastery or unity: testimony [of trauma] seems to be composed of bits and pieces of a memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have not settled into understanding or remembrance, acts that cannot be constructed as knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition, events in excess of our frames of reference. 7 The concept of trauma as a rupture of history's straightforward referentiality provides an interpretive methodology, positing that the effects of an event may be dispersed and manifested in forms that are not directly linked with the event, but which bear some trace of their source within their mediations.