The runaway horse: essays on the anxiety and representation of historical trauma
Embargo Date
2027-02-11
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
This dissertation investigates how the essay engages with historical and theoretical impasses related to the representation of traumatic memories in the wake of socio-political violence. Spanning several centuries, it encompasses the non-fiction texts exemplified by the sixteenth century works of Michel de Montaigne and Jean de Léry and essay films since the postwar era. Using close textual and visual analysis, I examine how the form of the essay, drawing from personal perspectives, moves between the exploration of individual trauma and the collective experience rooted in past traumatic events. The essay, I argue, presents formal innovations—from the use of subjective voice in literary form, transformed in the voiceover in essay films, to representation of animals—in the face of constraints on conveying historical trauma. With its tendency to emerge in times of crisis, the essay manifests itself as a critical response to historical violence. Michel de Montaigne’s Essais and the memoirs of Jean de Léry react to extreme events witnessed during the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598). The early essay film Le Sang des bêtes (1949) by Georges Franju, as well as later essayistic films by Chantal Akerman such as Dis-moi (1980) and No Home Movie (2015) grapple with traumatic memories of the Holocaust. My Friend Ivan Lapshin by Aleksei German (1985), a Soviet drama with essayistic elements, is haunted by the Great Terror under Joseph Stalin’s leadership. In attempt to re-write past individual trauma, the essay film Maison du bonheur (2017) by Sofia Bohdanowitz confronts oppressive patriarchal structures of societies. These divergent works share an urge to tell stories of traumatic experience from the margins of literature and cinema. In the studied texts, disturbance and cruelty as external forces relate uncannily to themes of consumption, where food becomes a locus of violence. Chapter one traces the origin of the genre of the essay film through analysis of Georges Franju’s short documentary film Le Sang des bêtes (1949) about animal slaughterhouses in the outskirts of Paris. Grappling with traumatic memories of the Second World War, Franju appeals to the origin of representation—the animal—to reinvent the form of documentary filmmaking and depict the trauma of witnessing French collaboration in deporting Jews during the Holocaust, alongside the dehumanization of war. The killing of horses for meat production brings to the fore the ambivalence of food tethered to ethical judgments of the self and others. Chapters two and three, based on close readings of Montaigne’s Essais and Jean de Léry’s memoirs, reconcile individual and collective trauma during a time of heightened violence of the Wars of Religion (1562—1598) and the colonization of the New World. In his Essais, Montaigne notably uses the shifting symbol of the horse and an errant figure of the author moving between personal experience and historical events to demonstrate the illusory line between “civilized” and “barbaric.” In Léry’s memoirs Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (1578) and Histoire mémorable du siège et de la famine de Sancerre (1573), written in the wake of St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, witnessing cannibalism and consumption of written records during extreme famine reflects his haunting fear of being unable to bear witness. Chapter four expands the notion of witnessing by accounting for an anxiety of transmission across generations. Introducing the question of gender in their works, filmmakers Chantal Akerman and Sofia Bohdanowitz explore individual and collective memory in post-Holocaust society through recourse to substitute grandmotherly figures. Scenes of cooking and non(eating) in their essay films become at once embodied representation of trauma and markers of new generation of filmmakers ignited by the second-wave feminism.
Description
2024
License
Attribution 4.0 International