New Writing

Diaries are a collision of word and world. They are what Umberto Eco designates “open works” that reveal the importance and power of the act of writing. Author Dorothy Allison recounts her frustration with the limits that formal narrative conventions impose: “I’m only supposed to tell one story at a time, one story,” she writes, “every writing course I ever heard of said the same thing”. In life as opposed to in narrative, humans are living through any number of parallel realities, and thus the demand for “one story” results in many facets of the human experience being omitted. As a private versus a public form of discourse, diaries often illuminate the aspects of life experience that society endeavors to silence and suppress. Often what is repressed in literature is the story of the body. Women in general, and women writers in particular, have a problematic history with embodiment. Excised from intellectual spheres for centuries for purportedly being incapable of rising above their reproductive function to form an objective opinion, it is of no surprise that women writers were leery of discussing their bodies in their literary works when they finally gained their precarious foothold in the intellectual sphere. While the past few decades have seen a movement towards the inscription of women’s bodies into their texts, this was not a phenomenon overtly present in the earlier writing of the twentieth century. This essay is not focused on the absence of women’s bodies in Modernist literature, but rather the presence of women’s bodies in their private writing during the physically and psychologically traumatizing atmosphere of the Second World War. I will explore the bodily narratives in the Second World War diaries of Etty Hillesum (An Interrupted Life), Marie Vassiltchikov (The Berlin Diaries 1940-1945), and Marguerite Duras (section I of her collection The War). The bodily passages in these diaries take many forms, such as meditations on menstruation and pregnancy, descriptions of soldiers’ ravaged bodies, the corpses of bombing victims, discussions of sickness and exhaustion, and the use of bodily metaphors. While each diary contains a multitude of bodily references, this essay will explore the role the body plays in recounting traumatic memory. How were individuals coping with what Marguerite Duras calls the “mass of death dealt by God’s creature to his fellows”? What does diary writing tell us about how humans experience and memorialize trauma? What does diary writing tell us about the body? Do we analyze the world in bodily terms? Does the body hinder writing? Does writing constrict the body?

Etty Hillesum, Marguerite Duras, and Marie Vassiltchikov had markedly different experiences of the Second World War. Hillesum, a young Jewish woman living in a communal household in Amsterdam at the outset of World War II, was an aspiring writer and philosopher with a strong academic background. She kept her diary as the civil liberties of Jews in Holland were slowly removed and the impending reality of the Holocaust was revealed, ending her diary shortly after her assignment to the transport camp of Westerbork. Duras, the daughter of a French math teacher who grew up in poverty in Indochina (now Vietnam), but moved to Paris when she was 17, was an established writer and member of the Résistance who was prominent in the Parisian political and intellectual spheres. She wrote her diary as the war ended and she awaited uncertain news of the fate her husband, Robert Antelme, who was imprisoned in a concentration camp for his resistance activities. Vassiltchikov was a White Russian Princess, who was exiled from Russia during the Russian Revolution. During the war she worked first in Berlin at the Foreign Ministry’s Information Department, and then as a Red Cross Nurse in Vienna. Vehemently anti-Nazi, she was involved in the failed plot to kill Hitler, the 20th of July plot, and its bloody aftermath, which resulted in the torture and execution of many of her closest friends. The only similarity in these women’s situations was their remarkable independence, something afforded to each of them in part by their social position. War, however, erodes the trappings of society, and each of these women found themselves hungry and struggling for survival as the war progressed. Despite their divergent cultural backgrounds and circumstances, these women shared an urgency to bear witness to the horrors of the Second World War and the impulse to write about these horrors in terms of their physical state.

Events defined as traumatic by the American Psychiatric Association are: “combat, sexual and physical assault, being held hostage or imprisoned, terrorism, torture, natural and manmade disasters, accidents, and receiving a diagnosis of a life-threatening illness”. The Second World War separated itself as the first total war, bringing horrors typically confined to the battlefield into the domestic sphere. Civilians witnessed death, destruction, starvation, and genocide on an unprecedented scale. All boundaries of ethical warfare, if there is such a thing, were transgressed as women, children, and the elderly were butchered alongside soldiers while a supposedly modern civilization either witnessed or was complicit. In this exceptionally violent climate, Vassiltchikov, Duras, and Hillesum experienced a multitude of events that would be classified as traumatic. Vassiltchikov, living in Berlin and Vienna during devastating bomb blitzes, witnessed cityscapes turned into apocalyptic scenes of smoke, fire, rubble, with piles of corpses littering the landscape. Working as a nurse, she tended soldiers with full body burns, missing limbs, and gangrene. Hillesum, who worked for the Jewish Council providing food and provisions to Jews passing through the Nazi transportation camp of Westerbork (where she was eventually interned), witnessed first-hand the horrifying realities of the Holocaust. Duras lived through the German occupation of Paris. Being a member of the Résistance brought her into contact with more violent aspects of the occupation, such as the torture and murder of individuals on both sides of the conflict. As the war ended, she waited in the train stations day after day as trainloads of concentration camp victims arrived in a physical state she describes as worse than death. Living through these devastating circumstances exacted a physical and psychological toll on all three women.

The nineteenth century presented a shift in the concept of trauma from a physical injury to a psychological one, from wounded body to wounded mind, as it was recognized that severe psychic repercussions remained in trauma survivors long after their experience of the traumatic event. Interestingly, this psychic wound is conveyed in distinctly physical terms in all three diaries, as each woman turns to metaphors of bodily pain and destruction to convey their psychological and emotional experiences of the war. In two strikingly similar passages which conflate physical and psychological pain, Vassiltchikov and Hillesum, respectively, write:

In both passages, emotional and psychological distress are configured as the physical body, in particular the head, being crushed. The image of the head, as opposed to other parts of the body, is representative of a specifically psychic breach. In a particularly disturbing image of terrorizing pain, Hillesum writes:

Here Hillesum gives her soul, or emotional state, the distinctly physical presence of a body stripped of its skin. In all three passages the physical body becomes metonymic for the emotional and psychological body, conveying the overwhelming sense of a complete lack of control as that body is violated by outside forces.

As the war progresses, the metaphors change, moving from images of pain and constriction to those of disease, death, and decomposition. Duras writes, “I can’t hold my head up anymore. My legs and arms are heavy, but not so heavy as my head. It’s not a head anymore, it’s an abscess”. Again in this passage we have the image of the head borne down on by an oppressive weight. However, Duras moves to the grotesque image of her head as an abscess, her rational mind replaced by a festering wound. Hillesum states: “I feel as if a layer of ashes were being sprinkled over my heart, as if my face were withering and decaying before my very eyes”. Departing from the Old Testament practice of sprinkling ashes over one’s body as an act of mourning, Hillesum chooses the more raw and vulnerable image of her heart being smothered in ashes to represent the acuteness of her emotional state. This image is coupled with one of her face decomposing, as she watches helplessly. Both passages again connote feelings of loss of control, though this has moved from a situation of pain and distress to one of a complete breakdown, as the decomposition of the physical and psychological body reflects the decomposition of the cultural body each woman belongs to. Although Duras, Hillesum, and Vassiltchikov analyze the war, and their psychological and emotional responses to the war, through corporeal metaphors, literary devices elude them when it comes time for them to describe their physiological experience of trauma.

Trauma, whether physical or psychological, witnessed or experienced, manifests itself in distinctly bodily terms. Neurological and adrenaline responses include nausea, dry mouth, dizziness, cold sweating, hypervigilance, hyperstartle responses such as jumpiness and surges in strength, vomiting, accelerated heart rate, rapid breathing, constricted breathing, a slowed perception of time, momentary paralysis, and loss of consciousness. Traumatic stress is immediately evident in each woman’s diary, though it is exceptionally present in Duras and Vassiltchikov’s. Both women recount direct physiological responses to the trauma they experience, as well as posttraumatic stress symptoms, such as flashbacks, loss of appetite, and nightmares. The language each woman employs in these passages is very direct, even clipped, and often expressed in incomplete sentences, such as “Am beginning to feel ill” and “Temperature”. Vassiltchikov writes that her “heart begins to beat” whenever the air raid sirens start, and that this reaction is exacerbated as the war progresses, and Duras recalls her “heart leaping about”. Vassiltchikov vomits on a train platform “due to a nervous reaction settling in”; Duras vomits whenever she tries to eat, wasting away to a near skeletal state. Nightmares keep both women from sleeping: Vassiltchikov shouts so much in her sleep that she has to be given tranquilizers, and Duras writes that, “for some time now I haven’t known what sleep is. I wake up, so I know that I’ve been asleep”. These recollections, and others like them, display the diarists’ awareness of the physical toll that the trauma they are living is exacting on them, and their need to document this aspect of their war experience. The breakdown of narrative in the face of bodily trauma, however, is evidenced in their absence of both imagery and syntax.

Trauma theorist Cathy Caruth asserts that trauma is the confrontation with an event that is so horrific and unexpected that it cannot be placed within schemes of prior knowledge. Bessel van der Kolk, a leading psychiatrist in the field of trauma, explains that when faced with such an inassimilable event, the victim experiences “speechless terror”; because the traumatic experience cannot be organized on a linguistic level, or with words or symbols, it is left to be organized on a “somatosensory” level, or with behavioral enactments, nightmares, and flashbacks. Trauma, as we have discussed, produces a particular set of neurological responses in the body. It is this set of neurological responses, rather than an objective observation, that are stored as the somatosensory memory of the traumatic event. These traumatic memories are thus categorized by sensory impressions such as fleeting images, sounds, bodily movements, and physical pain. This split between the body and the mind is called dissociation. The presence of dissociation, or, as Sigmund Freud terms it, the splitting of the content of consciousness, is essential to the understanding of trauma. Contemporary research has shown that the dissociation of a traumatic experience occurs at the moment of trauma. According to van der Kolk, trauma survivors see the scene of their trauma from a distance, or disappear entirely, leaving other aspects of their personality to suffer and store the overwhelming experience. One of the fundamental characteristics of these traumatic, sensory memories, according to trauma theorist Ruth Leys, is that they are not represented as past, but are “perpetually re-experienced in a painful, dissociated, traumatic present”. Trauma and traumatic memory thus alter linear time, which has a clear beginning and end, and the traumatized person lives in parallel temporalities: the realm of their traumatic experience and the realm of their ordinary life. To summarize, traumatic memory has three main characteristics: it is sensory versus linguistic, it is dissociative, and it is inassimilable in linear time.

What implications does this non-linear, dissociative, sensory experience of traumatic memory have in relation to narrative? Charlotte Delbo, an author and Holocaust survivor, describes the disruptive nature of traumatic memory within narrative in Days and Memories. Delbo distinguishes between what she calls ‘deep memory’, or the memory of traumatic experiences that provides “sensations” and “physical imprints” and is “swollen with emotional charge” and ‘external memory’, or the “intellectual memory” which is “connected with the thinking process”. Stipulating that words issue from external memory, not deep memory, she connects external memory to the narrative process; it is external memory, the memory of the objective storyteller, which allows an author to impose linearity in their narratives. It is the imposition of this orderly, external memory which allows the survivor to function in society. Without it, Delbo asserts, she would not have been able to survive. Deep memory, conversely, is the memory of the senses, laden with emotion and distinctly non-narrative; this is the realm of traumatic memory. The fundamental characteristic of this deep memory is that it arises, unbidden (within narrative). Delbo likens it to a breach or rupture, stating that although the skin enfolding her traumatic memories of Auschwitz is tough, it “gives way at times, revealing all it contains”, and thrusts her into the perpetually present realm of trauma. “But if I dream of the thirst I suffered in Birkenau”, Delbo writes, “I physically feel that real thirst and it is an atrocious nightmare”. Her lack of control in this situation is paramount; “the conscious will has no power” over these breaches.

In Holocaust Testimonies, Lawrence Langer uses Delbo’s notions of deep memory and external memory, or common memory, to analyze Yale’s videotaped Holocaust testimonies. Langer asserts that deep memory “suspects and depends on” common memory, knowing what common memory cannot know but endeavors to convey. He documents events in witness testimony where deep memory intrudes on common memory, disrupting the flow of narrative, and analyzes the significance of these disruptions in relation to personal narrative, memory, and survival. He challenges the audience of the holocaust testimonies to “recognize and interpret” the movements from external to deep memory.

Langer has chosen to study oral testimonies because he believes that authors of survivor memoirs intentionally remove deep memories from their narrative. He asserts that survivor memoirs must abide by certain literary conventions, such as chronology, description, characterization, dialogue, and, most importantly, narrative voice. This narrative voice imposes a perceived sequence on chaotic episodes, regardless of whether that sequence was perceived identically when the events were experienced. Witnesses are compelled to impose order in their narratives in order to preclude the possibility of their audience not understanding their testimony. Memory is thus subjected to the conventions which define the believable. The consequence of this imposed narrative is that the memories conveyed alter actual events, and memory becomes, as Roberta Culbertson terms it, a social fabrication, “a weaving together of the thin, sometimes delicate and intertwined threads of true memory, the re-membered, so that those might be told”. In this situation, deep memory, with its fleeting, dissociative, and impressionistic qualities, is removed from the narrative, and replaced by a more cohesive storyline. In their quest to convey legitimate memory, the demands of narrative thus operate as “cultural silencers” to sensory and bodily memories. Telling, Culbertson asserts, is thus a process of disembodying and demystifying memory. The consequence of this disembodied memory is the suppression of the body’s recall of its response to trauma, and of the wordless language in which it expresses this pain.

Diaries provide an interesting framework for examining the intersection of sense memory and narrative memory, because, although the women are narrativizing their traumatic experience, they are doing so for personal, rather than public, processing of the event. Their narratives, unencumbered by the pressure of enabling public understanding, display the bodily memories of adrenaline responses to trauma, traumatic dissociation, and the eruption of sense memories within narrative. By using Delbo’s and Langer’s theories to explicate the writing of Duras and Vassiltchikov, neither of whom were victims of the Holocaust, I in no way wish to assert that their experience of World War II can be compared to that of the Holocaust. I do, however, find Delbo’s and Langer’s theories on the intersection of deep and common memory to be helpful in analysying the bodily passages in the diaries. I would also be remiss if I did not mention the related work of Jennifer Willging, who used Delbo and Langer to analyze Duras’ story ‘Monsieur X’, which is published alongside Duras’ diary in The War.

Who is she?

I have chosen two passages to discuss, one from Vassiltchikov, and one from Duras. Vassiltchikov describes an event that occurred as she bent down to pick up her accordion, which had fallen off of her bicycle in front of a bombed out building:

Vassiltchikov’s zeroing in on the woman’s shoe reflects two aspects of the body’s adrenaline response to trauma as discussed by Culbertson: first, the effect of an adrenaline rush, which results in a hyper-awareness of the minutest details, and second, the effect of a non-adrenaline rush, or the freeze response, which manifests in the victim focusing on something small, which enables them to dissociate from the larger, traumatic event. Vassiltchikov’s inability to deal with this event on an analytical level is further evidenced by her immediate movement to another subject after relaying this memory, without elaborating on it. In a novel, autobiography, or memoir, she would have had to have commented on her emotions, or remarked that the lorry loaded with corpses was horrific and extremely upsetting. In her diary, however, she is able to record the memory as she experienced it: confronted with something inassimilable, she froze, tightened her focus on something she could process, the innocuous detail of the heel-less shoe, and rode on.

Duras, who of all three women suffered the greatest psychological damage during the war, provides several passages which display the phenomenon of deep memory disrupting the linear narrative of external memory, as well as the split being that arises from this dissociation. She writes of a night where she felt she intuitively knew that her husband had died:

There is a marked shift in tense in this passage. Duras begins in the past tense of external, or narrative memory: “I’d stood up” and “It happened”. As her deep memory breaches this external memory, Duras’ narration moves simultaneously to the present tense and the bodily: “no more throbbing in my head”, “my face falls apart”, “I fall apart”, “I can’t feel my heart anymore”. The sensory memories intrude as perpetually present. Perhaps the most striking element of this passage is the complete traumatic dissociation, evidenced by Duras switching from first person to third person narration, from “I” to “she”, as if she is watching her collapse from a distance. Her heart rending question, “Who is she?”, illuminates the most overwhelming aspect of trauma: the inexorable separation of self before the traumatic event from the self that will live on afterwards.

"And here, the body also has a thing or two to say. It is very tiring to write." Hélène Cixous

The physical and psychological toll that the war exacted upon these women becomes increasingly apparent in their narratives, as large lapses begin to appear between entries. It is clear from the diaries that the relationship between the body and the mind was that of a struggle. Duras takes us through this struggle, writing:

Duras’ anxiety manifests itself physically in her head throbbing and her heart pounding. The staccato of her language ‘must stop, stop, calm, must, must stop’ belies the fact that she cannot, in fact, calm herself down and has lost control of both her body and her mind. Hillesum, who, unlike Duras, was able to mentally and spiritually rise above the horrors of the war, nonetheless recounts her frustration with her body, which is not as accommodating as her mental faculties. “But though my mind has come to terms with it all, my body hasn’t,” she writes, “It has disintegrated into a thousand pieces, and each piece has a different pain”. “My body has spoken up for itself,” she states finally, “and called a halt”. Duras and Vassiltchikov experience similar collapses, abandoning their diaries due to complete exhaustion. In the end, for all three women, the body ultimately gained the upper hand.

It is telling that the body, in all its power, and which bears the brunt of the traumatic experience, is what has been oppressed within our collective, historical recollection of war. Although the bodily passages of Duras’, Hillesum’s, and Vassiltchikov’s diaries, and others like them, lack the narrative form that as humans we crave in order to be able to process information, they provide an important page in human history. Stories, with their linear narrative trajectory, and history books, with their sets of facts, diagrams, statistics, and photographs, have the effect of making war assimilable, digestible if you will. War becomes something one can process, a story with heroes and villains, a beginning and an ending. In reality, war is no such thing; it is horrifying beyond all scope of our imagination. The body tells a wordless story, a story of the psychological and physiological break down that is to experience war. These women’s diaries give us a window into the traumatic realm of war, of the basest tolls that it exacts on the people who live through it, the collateral damage caused by the governments who continue to sustain a warring culture.