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European Journal of English

Studies
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Geoffrey Hartman and the Ethics

of Place: Landscape, Memory,
Trauma
Anne Whitehead
Published online: 09 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Anne Whitehead (2003) Geoffrey Hartman and the Ethics of Place:
Landscape, Memory, Trauma, European Journal of English Studies, 7:3, 275-292
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1076/ejes.7.3.275.27988

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European Journal of English Studies

2003, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 275292

Geoffrey Hartman and the Ethics of Place:

Landscape, Memory, Trauma
Anne Whitehead

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University of Newcastle upon Tyne

An ethics of place
It is well documented that the impulse which landscape evokes to organize a site according to pictorial conventions (the picturesque) and to
locate ourselves in relation to the space is a recently acquired cultural
response. It was with the rise of European Romanticism that the environment became assimilated into aesthetic categories, and was contemplated
by an enraptured subject, in a process of increasing introspection and selfawareness. Ulrich Baer has astutely observed:
To look at a landscape as we do today manifests a specifically
modern sense of self-understanding, which may be described as
the individuals ability to view herself within a larger, and possibly
historical, context.1
The Romantic/modern subject therefore gazes upon a vista, not so much to
see the landscape for its own sake, as to reflect back upon the self. A vista
is pleasing in accordance with its ability to be subsumed into the viewers
increasing self-awareness, through projection and identification.
The process of viewing a landscape is therefore one of careful construction, through which the indifferent or unaccomodating space of a site or
environment is transformed into a place, which draws the viewer into its
territory. Crucial to this task of conversion is the viewers location of a
proper position or perspective, from which to gain access to the landscape.
On encountering a particular site, the viewer must find her bearings in relation to it, in order to fulfil the demands of landscape. The contemplation
Correspondence: Anne Whitehead, School of English Literature, Language & Linguistics,
University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle upon Tyne, NEI 7RU, UK.
1

Ulrich Baer, To Give Memory a Place: Holocaust Photography and the Landscape
Tradition, Representations 69 (2000), 3862, p. 43.
1382-5577/03/0703-275$16.00 Taylor & Francis Ltd.

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ANNE WHITEHEAD

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of landscape teaches us that what we see is always and inevitably a question of how we see and from where we see. This emphasis on landscape
as a process of positioning is crucial to a consideration of the connection
between landscape and trauma, and provides an important background to
Hartmans writing. The traumas of the recent past challenge our ability to
position ourselves in relation to them, or to find our bearings. All efforts
to confront and remember the past must be preceded by an ethical consideration of the perspective from which we, as belated witnesses, view the
event. In the eloquent words of Baer:
Where is the proper position from which to face this stark truth, and
how is this notion of a position related to the experience of place?
Prior to all efforts at commemoration, explanation or understanding,
I would suggest, we must find a place and a position from which we
may then gain access to the event.2
(Re)situating Hartman
This article seeks to contend that the place of Hartman in the literature of
trauma theory is more significant than has often hitherto been recognized,
because of his emphasis on the importance of landscape, and the experience of place, in relation to memory. In considering the at times marginalized position of Hartman in the area of trauma theory, it is instructive
to explore the ways in which his writing has been situated in the field of
Romantic studies. In relation to Romanticism, Hartman is often separated
from precisely those figures who subsequently became central to the development of trauma theory, namely Paul de Man and Cathy Caruth.
Hartman took the lead in situating himself in relation to Romantic studies, characteristically resisting the assimilation of his work to one theory or
system. Included with Derrida, de Man and J. Hillis Miller in the group of
Yale critics, the deconstructionists who emerged out of the Yale school
in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Hartman protested his differences from
the other critics in a strongly worded preface to Deconstruction and Criticism:
Derrida, de Man and Miller are certainly boa-deconstructors, merciless and consequent, though each enjoys his own style of disclosing
again and again the abysm of words. But Bloom and Hartman are
barely deconstructionists. They even write against it on occasion
For them the ethos of literature is not dissociable from its pathos,
2

Ibid.

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whereas for deconstructionist criticism, literature is precisely that

use of language which can purge pathos, which can show that it too
is figurative, ironic, or aesthetic.3
Hartman set himself apart from the deconstructionist critics by emphasizing his own interest in literatures evocation of human emotion (pathos),
which, in Hartmans eloquent metaphor, is crushed out of texts by deconstruction.
Following Hartmans lead, other critics have situated him in an oppositional relation to deconstruction, and in particular to the work of de Man.
Of particular interest in relation to trauma theory is a collection of essays
edited by Cynthia Chase, entitled Romanticism (1993). This collection
opens with Hartmans essay on the role of the imagination in Romantic literature; this is followed by de Man on the notion of temporality in
Wordsworth; and, following shortly on from this, is Caruth on Wordsworth
and Freud. In a polemical and influential introduction, Chase notes the
deconstructionist emphasis of many of the essays in the volume, a method
of approaching texts which she terms rhetorical reading. For Chase, such
essays emphasize the tendency of Romantic texts to question or undercut
the very unity to which they aspire. Within the volume, Chase explicitly
identifies the readings of de Man and Caruth with a deconstructionist
approach. Hartman is identified apart from such reading strategies, and
located by Chase as a precursor to methods of deconstruction.4 His essay
is regarded as an example of phenomenological criticism, because it takes
as self-evident concepts or abstractions such as imagination, nature and
self-knowledge, which a more rhetorical or deconstructionist reading of
Wordsworth would call into question. Chase therefore decisively separates
Hartman from those very figures de Man and Caruth who subsequently
became central to the development of trauma theory.
Turning in the volume to de Mans Time and History in Wordsworth,
it becomes evident, however, that Chases positioning of Hartman follows
the lead of de Man, whose essay is precisely concerned to locate his own
work in relation to Hartman. De Mans fundamental point of disagreement with Hartman lies in the latters emphasis on the role of nature in
Wordsworth. For Hartman, Wordsworths poetry traces a triadic structure
of individual development from Nature, through Self-Consciousness
to Imagination which parallels the Biblical structure of Eden, Fall and
3
4

Geoffrey Hartman, Preface, in Deconstruction and Criticism, eds. Harold Bloom et

al. (New York: Continuum-Seabury Press, 1979), viiix, p. ix.
Cynthia Chase, ed. Romanticism (London and New York: Longman, 1993), p. 5.

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Redemption. The childs unmediated relation with nature is thus interrupted by the weight of language and self-consciousness; however, Hartmans interest lies in the transition from self-consciousness to imagination,
in which an unmediated relation with nature is once more achieved, albeit
in a significantly altered form. For de Man, the disjunctive and rhetorical
nature of language prevents an unmediated relation with the empirical
world. In contrast to Hartman, de Man argues that Wordsworth is not primarily concerned with the relation of the imagination to nature, but rather
with the relationship between the imagination and time.
Hartmans positioning in Romantic studies, and its implications for
his location in trauma theory, can be effectively illustrated through the
example of Wordsworths description of the Crossing of the Alps, in Book
VI of The Prelude. Chase argues that Hartmans reading of Wordsworths
description designates the passage as a trope for the movement from
Nature through Self-Consciousness to Imagination. Turning to Hartmans
reading of the passage in Wordsworths Poetry 1787-1814 (1964),5 it is
evident that Hartman does indeed provide a structural analysis based on his
own triad of individual development. The first part of the passage (1805
Prelude VI, 488-524)6 reflects Hartmans concept of Nature, in its dependency on the immediacy of the external world; Wordsworth describes in
relatively straightforward narrative terms the increasing difficulties and
perplexities of the journey. In the second part (1805 Prelude VI, 525-548),
Wordsworths thought or feeling arises not in relation to external stimulus,
but rather from the poets mind in response to memory. For Hartman, the
famous apostrophe to Imagination corresponds to Self-Consciousness,
because the poet realises that the power he has looked for in the outside
world is really within. The third part (1805 Prelude VI, 549-572) merges
internal and external worlds, reflecting the realm of Imagination, in which
the poet attains a richer, more sustaining relation with nature. The gloomy
pass which the travellers follow in this section (1805 Prelude VI, 554)
represents the crucial point of transition between Self-Consciousness and
Imagination.
Where Hartmans interpretation emphasizes the changing relation
of the poet to nature, de Mans reading of the same passage relates the
heightening of pitch in this section to the relation between consciousness
and time or history. De Man draws attention to the confusion of the pas5
6

Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworths Poetry 17871814 (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1964).
All references to The Prelude are to William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1799, 1805,
1850, eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York and
London: W. W. Norton, 1979).

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sage as the travellers follow a maze of falling and climbing paths on their
ascent of the Simplon Pass. Such is the bewilderment of the route that the
travellers, on asking their way, learn that they are beyond their goal and
have unwittingly already crossed the Alps (1805 Prelude VI, 520-4). At
this point, Wordsworth breaks off from his narrative and introduces the
apostrophe to the Imagination. After this hymn in praise of mans highest
faculty, the narrative is resumed with the description of the descent. For
de Man, the significance of the passage is temporal. Its narrative ordering
reveals a new pattern of historical understanding in which a chronological
movement, rising in a simple and uniform manner like the ascent of a peak,
is replaced by a more complex and contradictory structure, in which an act
and its interpretation are radically disjointed.
Rather, it appears much more in that twilight in which for Wordsworth the crossing of the Alps was bathed, in which the coming-toconsciousness is in arrears vis--vis the actual act, and consequently
is to be understood not as a conquest but rather as a rectification or
even a reproach.7
The apostrophe to Imagination is interpreted by de Man as an excess of
interiority, which causes the chronological patterning of temporality to fail,
and gives rise to a disjunction between an act and its coming to consciousness. In terms of trauma theory, these readings of Book VI act decisively in
the positioning of Hartman, de Man and Caruth. Hartman is perceived to be
a precursor to de Man and Caruth: his emphasis on nature appears to be out
of line with their more temporal concerns. De Man, on the contrary, arises
as a central figure in relation to trauma theory: his emphasis on a missed
experience (the unwitting crossing of the Alps), and his formulation of a
belated relation between an act and its coming to consciousness, prefigure
Caruths formulation of unclaimed experience and her most important
insights into the structural characteristics of trauma.
A closer reading of Hartmans analysis, however, reveals that a more
complex temporal structure is present in his reading. It is evident that
Hartman locates the apostrophe to the Imagination precisely as a belated
coming-to-consciousness of the significance of the event. Hartman points
out that it is fourteen years after the original event of ascending the Simplon pass (in the summer of 1790), that Wordsworth realised the significance of missing his goal of crossing the Alps. In writing the passage in
7

Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press,
1984), p. 58.

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The Prelude, Wordsworth explores the disappointment surrounding the

missed experience and belatedly recognizes the significance of the power
of the Imagination. In focusing on a complex and contradictory temporal
movement, in which it is not only the present that can revisit the past in
Wordsworths recollection of the ascent of the Alps but also the past
that can intrude on the present in the belated shock of recognition of the
Imagination Hartman engages with precisely those tropes of temporality
and belatedness which are central to the development of trauma theory.
The Boy of Winander
Arguably the most important passage in The Prelude, in relation to positioning Hartman in the context of trauma theory, is the episode in Book
V describing the Boy of Winander (1805 Prelude V, 389422). The passage relates the childs skilful mimicry of owl calls, to which the owls
initially respond. However, the boy is faced with a lengthening silence,
during which the independent power of nature is impressed upon him. The
second part of the passage is separated from the first by a typographical
space: in this section, the boys death is introduced without warning or
explanation. The poet describes the landscape in which the boy is buried
and his own contemplative silence before the grave. The episode of the
Boy of Winander was not only of particular importance to Wordsworth,
but has also acted as a point of particular fascination for both de Man and
Hartman.
De Mans reading of the passage has proved authoritative, and once
again anticipates many of the key preoccupations of trauma theory, in
particular in the writing of Caruth. In Time and History in Wordsworth,
de Man emphasizes the autobiographical aspect of the passage: in an earlier version, Wordsworth wrote of the boy in the first person as opposed
to the third (pauses of deep silence mocked my skill). Interpreted within
an autobiographical framework, the poem becomes a reflection on Wordsworths own death, which is precisely a non-empirical event one cannot,
for de Man, experience ones own death. Central to the Boy of Winander
passage, therefore, is death as a missed experience, which cannot be
portrayed in representational or descriptive language: its presence in the
passage lies in the blank or space between the two sections. De Mans
twin emphases on the missed experience and on the death encounter arise
repeatedly in Caruths writing on trauma.
De Mans reading of the passage reflects on the relation of language
and the non-empirical event; he questions what kind of language is possible in the absence of the representational. Interpreting the opening of the
passage as a trope for language in its representational mode the boys

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mimic hootings establish a mirroring relation between himself and nature

de Man argues that the suspension of this relationship in the deepening
silence not only acts to prefigure the boys death, but also acts as a figure
for the movement from mimetic language into rhetorical figuration. For de
Man, the rhetorical function of language allows for some degree of reflection on ones own death. De Man distinguishes in the Boy of Winander
passage between thematic concept the boys death, which as the death
of another can be stated and situated and rhetorical fiction the use of
the boys death as a substitute for the death of the I, which lies beyond the
reach of reflection and cannot be named or written. As thematic concept,
the death of the boy is written in the third person and employs a retrospective temporality. However, this reading obscures a rhetorical fiction, in
which the passage acts as a reflection on the poets own death, operating in
the first person and employing a proleptic or anticipatory tense: ones own
death must always necessarily be thought of as a future event. Drawing
together the thematic and rhetorical aspects of the poem, de Man argues
that, in order to contemplate his own death, the poet must employ a series
of linguistic trickeries.
But to be able to imagine, to convey the experience, the consciousness of mortality, [Wordsworth] can only represent death as something that happened to another person, in the past Wordsworth is
thus anticipating a future event as if it existed in the past. Seeming
to be remembering, to be moving to a past, he is in fact anticipating
a future.8
Working in the interstices between event and experience, de Mans reading
demonstrates that the recording of the non-empirical event that which
is not susceptible to experience renders it accessible as retrospective
construction or repetition. In his rendering of history, de Mans thinking anticipates and influences contemporary writing on trauma, in which
the missed experience is not straightforwardly available to experience or
perception.
De Mans reading of the Boy of Winander once more locates his writing in a central relation to the development of trauma theory; once again,
however, a secondary effect is to relegate Hartman to a marginal position.
In de Mans construction of Hartmans reading, the latter fails to take
into account the rhetorical functioning of language, and remains fixed in
8

Paul de Man, Time and History in Wordsworth in Romanticism, ed. Cynthia Chase
(London and New York: Longman, 1993), 5577, p. 63

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a reading of the analogical correspondence between man and nature. In

Hartmans analysis, contained in Wordsworths Poetry, the pause which
marks the boys relation with the owls, affects the child by foretelling a
later state of mind. For Hartman, the central importance of the pauses
of deep silence (1805 Prelude V, 405), is that they are natures way of
leading the child into a deeper awareness. Under the guiding influence of
nature, the growth of the childs mind is achieved with a minimum of harm
and disruption. Wordsworth registers that for there to be development,
there must also be shock, but the effect of this is carefully minimized:
a gentle shock of mild surprise (1805 Prelude V, 407). For Hartman,
the passage emphasizes the generative and regenerative action of nature,
which almost imperceptibly unawares (1805 Prelude V, 410) converts the solipsistic into the sympathetic imagination. It appears that where
de Mans reading of the Boy of Winander passage asserts the lengthening
silence, culminating in death as a traumatic impasse or missed experience Hartmans reading is concerned to downplay the traumatic elements
of the passage, or to minimize the impact of the shock received.
A more constructive approach to reading the significance for trauma
theory of Hartmans interpretation of the Boy of Winander lies in a 1996
interview with Hartman, conducted by Caruth. In structuring the interview
around the Boy of Winander passage which is printed in full at the opening of the text Caruth indicates the importance for trauma theory, not
merely of the Wordsworth passage, but in particular of Hartmans reading.
Caruth highlights the relation which Hartman posits between the first and
second sections of the passage. Hartmans analysis of the first section, in
relation to his triad of development, leads the reader to anticipate that the
second section will relate the growth of the boy into maturity and perhaps
reveal that he has become a poet. Instead, the boy dies and Wordsworth
describes the poet as survivor, looking at the childs grave. In the untimely
death of the child, before he has reached maturity, a traumatic impasse is
reached.
Reading the blank space between the two sections of the passage as
a traumatic impasse, Hartman argues that the child cannot escape from
death at this transitional stage in his development to grow further into
consciousness is precisely to develop into an awareness of death; while
to resist growth is also to die, to be reabsorbed into nature, as is the boy
in the grave. The Boy of Winander thus dies at a crucial stage in human
life. Considering the autobiographical aspect of early manuscripts of the
passage, Hartman posits a complex and contradictory relation of survival
between the poet and the buried child. The curious half-hour pause at the
graveside suggests that the poet is not only concerned with the external

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matter of the grave, but is also engaged in a process of inward reflection.

Hartman suggests that, in the process of development, each individual
must bridge an impasse or precarious transition: Wordsworth signals that
every mature human being does so by replacing the boy with himself in the
second section of the passage he was a boy like that, but he is now selfconscious and aware of mortality. However, the autobiographical aspect of
the poem in which the boy was represented in the first person signals
that, in another sense, no one crosses such an impasse intact: in the figure
of the poet at the graveside, the survivor contemplates his own buried
childhood. For Hartman, then, the Wordsworth of The Prelude structures
the process of individual development around trauma, so that the psyche
is never fully prepared for the accidents which befall it: this connects with
Freuds insight, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that trauma originates in
the shock for which the psyche is unprepared. The poet who stands at the
childs grave is at once a testament to loss, and a testament to survival.
Caruth also draws attention to Hartmans emphasis on the role of language in the Boy of Winander passage, which finds a responsive echo in
her own writing. The traumatic impasse is, in one sense, passed through
at the end of the poem, not only in the figure of the poet reflecting on (his
own) death, but also in the writing of the poem itself. The problem that
arises for the reader once again involves a developmental impasse: the boy
of Winander is described at a stage where speech is still mimicry; moreover, he does not mimic human speech, but the animal sounds of nature.
The expectation of the reader is that in the second section of the poem,
there will be a development from the pre-linguistic stage to mature poetic
speech. However, in the passage from the pre-mature moment to maturity,
there is a movement from one form of muteness to another: the wordless
boy is replaced by the silent poet. For Caruth, this insight is central to her
own work on language in relation to trauma: that there is a poetic or literary
mode of language, which is not opposed to silence, but rather incorporates
and preserves within itself a form of traumatic muteness.9
Caruth further highlights the significance for her own writing of Hartmans emphasis on the importance of address. The passage opens with
the rhetorical figure of apostrophe: There was a boy, ye knew him well,
ye cliffs/And islands of Winander! (1805 Prelude V, 389390). In classical apostrophe, the figure of speech is addressed not to the living, but to
the dead; in order to represent the dead, the survivor summons their help.
In Wordsworth, although the poet is alive and the boy is dead, the poet
9

See, for example, Caruths remarks on traumatic speech in Cathy Caruth, Recapturing the Past, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore and
London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 151157, pp. 154155.

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nevertheless has to speak in some way with the voice of the dead (this
confusion of voice and mode of address is evident in Wordsworths shift
from first- to third-person across the manuscript versions of the passage).
Hartmans interest in the apostrophe as a mode of representing the dead
finds its most striking echo in Caruths discussion of the reaction of his
friends to the sudden and unanticipated death of Khalil, a teenage boy who
was shot in Atlanta: the group of friends regularly gathered in his room
and addressed the dead boy.10 It is also evident in Hartmans own work
on the Yale archive of Holocaust video testimony; his readings emphasize
the struggle of Holocaust survivors to mediate between the demands of the
living and the dead, in the articulation of their testimonies.
In The Boy of Winander, the apostrophe is addressed to the cliffs and
islands of Winander. The boy is entirely concerned to make nature echo
responsively; to create the sense of a bond between man and nature, which
overcomes the difference of speech and muteness. For Hartman, the poet
standing at the graveside also seeks to make nature Responsive to his call
(1805 Prelude V, 401), by evoking the cliffs and islands as a lasting presence, to watch over the child and to bear witness to the individual life. The
poet looking at the grave is framed by a series of other witness figures the
cliffs, the island, the Church which form enduring and affirming presences. In Hartmans analysis, however, the call of the poet also extends
to the reader of the poem: poetry exacts a demand that its readers respond
to its call in a reciprocal manner. In this sense, the reader is placed by
the poet: put on the spot, she is forced to negotiate her own position in
relation to the poem. Hartmans reading of Wordsworth therefore builds
up layers of responsiveness and responsibility of the boy to nature, the
poet to the boy, the reader to the poem which are deeply implicated in
an ethical approach to place. The poem not only explores the complex and
contradictory ways in which the boy can be placed in relation to the landscape of Winander, but also implicates the readers response to the call
of the poem as a part of the echoing and reverberating landscape. It is this
conjunction of memory and place, and the role of landscape in placing or
positioning its viewer, which forms a central aspect of Hartmans writing
in relation to trauma.
The Memory Place
Reflecting on the connections between his work on Wordsworth and his
writing on trauma and the Holocaust, Hartman identifies an interest in
10

Cathy Caruth, Parting Words: Trauma, Silence and Survival, in Between the Psyche
and the Polis: Refiguring History in Literature and Theory, eds. Michael Rossington
and Anne Whitehead (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 7796, p. 84.

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285

place, and its relation to memory and identity, as a common element of

his thinking. Speaking of his joint fascination with Wordsworth and the
Holocaust, Hartman observes:

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There is a clear separation between these subjects. But once I had

engaged with questions the Holocaust raised for me how do I take
this into consciousness, what can I do about it, is this in any way
thinkable, is it representable once I had gone along that path, my
interest in Wordsworths understanding of the memory process did
come in.11
For Hartman, one of the key aspects of Wordsworths originality lies in his
conversion of place into memory place, so that specific sites and landscapes create a temporal consciousness. In recollecting or describing past
states of being, Wordsworth is invariably concerned to situate the feeling
within a particular place or location.
Wordsworths merging of time and place is most famously illustrated in
the spots of time episode in Book XI of the 1805 Prelude. Wordsworth
here describes how he had strained with expectation and anticipation, as he
waited to be transported home from school one Christmas holiday. Climbing a crag overlooking two highways, he had watched the road intently to
see whether he could spy the horses which should be coming. As he recalls
this episode, the range and pitch of the poem is abruptly extended. Without
warning or preparation, Wordsworth recalls the death of his father within
ten days of his arrival home from school. Ever after, the recollection of
his father is indelibly associated in his mind with the craggy summit overlooking the road, although there is no causal connection between the two
events, merely a contiguity in time.
And all the business of the elements,
The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
And the bleak music of that old stone wall,
The noise of wood and water, and the mist
Which on the line of each of those two roads
Advanced in such indisputable shapes
All these were spectacles and sounds to which
I often would repair, and thence would drink
As at a fountain. (1805 Prelude XI, 376384)
11

In Cathy Caruth, An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman, Studies in Romanticism 35

(1996), 631-652, p. 645.

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Hartmans analysis of the passage in The Unremarkable Wordsworth

(1987) indicates Wordsworths construction of a special, burdened relation to time, so that the episode of climbing the crag stands out in his
consciousness, and in its merging of awareness of time with sensation
of place, allows him to physically perceive or spot time. Moreover, the
passage raises the perplexing question of the seeming lack of connection
between one term (the episode on the crags) and another term (the death
of the father). Although the two events are only linked by Wordsworths
experiencing them at roughly the same time, the passage in The Prelude
appears to suggest that, because the death of Wordsworths father occurred
shortly after the boyhood experience of expectant waiting, it was somehow
brought on by it. A distinct sense of guilty participation emerges, in which
the anticipatory desire of the boy on the crag becomes the cause of hastening his fathers death.
Hartmans reading powerfully suggests that Wordsworths description
of his experience is prophetic because it invokes the earlier, causally
unconnected experience, as a participator in, and precursor of, the later
event of his fathers death. Hartman defines the prophetic as a perfectly
ordinary mood [which] is seen to involve a sin against time12: a temporal
model is created in which a past action is reviewed in terms of subsequent
(and not necessarily related) events. In the terms of Frances Ferguson, the
action of romantic memory in Wordsworth serves not so much to record
the past, but rather to represent the power of seeing a past that one did not
experience at the time of its occurrence13 in this instance, a schoolboys
eager anticipation of the holidays is represented as a murderous action,
because of the subsequent and unforeseen death of his father. To borrow
the words of Hartman: The aftermath points to something unconscious
in the first instance but manifest and punishing now.14 In each of these
descriptions of the operations of memory, the structures of trauma are
present in the dislocation of event and experience, so that the event is not
fully experienced at the time of its occurrence, but only in a belated movement of return.
Wordsworths description of the memory of his anticipation on the
crag explicitly states that it acts as a focus of pleasurable recall: to
which / I would often repair, and thence would drink / As at a fountain
(1805 Prelude XI, 382384). It is initially unclear why this memory of his
12
13
14

Geoffrey Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (London: Methuen, 1987), p.

170.
Frances Ferguson, Romantic Memory, Studies in Romanticism 35 (1996), 509534,
p. 533.
Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth, p. 170.

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fathers death, which incurs feelings of guilt and remorse, should act as
a site of pleasurable return. Ferguson suggests that a secondary form of
memory is in operation here. Wordsworth indicates that the memory is a
cluster of spectacles and sounds (1805 Prelude XI, 382), which remain
loosely connected, and do not coalesce into a causal chain of events. The
work of memory would thus act as a locus of pleasure, because that which
is recalled does not provide sufficient evidence for Wordsworth to accuse
himself of having caused his fathers death. In merely holding the event
on the crag and the fathers death in contiguity, the memory provides
convincing evidence that Wordsworth has not acted and so is not guilty of
the death. Ferguson terms such an operation of memory as circumstantial
memory.15
Reading across Hartmans writing on Wordsworth and his work on
the Holocaust video testimonies, Ferguson suggests that the operations of
circumstantial memory can also be detected in Hartmans readings of the
latter. Taking as an example Hartmans reading of a womans video testimony in Cinema Animal,16 Ferguson draws out the workings of circumstantial memory in Hartmans analysis. The videotestimony documents the
womans traumatic separation from her baby during a Nazi action. The
woman wraps her baby in a coat, so that it appears to be a bundle, and tries
to smuggle it past a German guard; however, the baby makes a noise and
the guard requests that she hand over the bundle. In the womans description, her profound sense of guilt and responsibility for handing over her
baby (even though it is under orders, and all choice is removed from her by
the circumstances) is countered by the confusion of her description, which
muddles key elements of the story such as the side on which she carried
the bundle, and whether she was indeed carrying a baby or a bundle so
that the narrative cannot coalesce into a series of causal events, and thereby
indicate that she has acted. Fergusons analysis of circumstantial memory
therefore indicates an important aspect of Hartmans writing on memory,
which dynamically interrelates his work on Wordsworth and on the Holocaust.
Hartman is not only concerned with the connections across his work
on Wordsworth and the Holocaust, but also with the dissonances between
them. Considering Wordsworths obsession with place, as revealed in the
spots of time episode, Hartman argues that there is something sinister or
dark about Wordsworths construction, and that the burden of time, which
is produced and felt, is related to trauma:
15
16

Ferguson, Romantic Memory, p. 528.

Bessie K. Holocaust Testimony CHVT-205. Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust
Testimonies. Yale University Library.

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Whether or not, then, we understand Wordsworths experience fully,

the spots of time describe a trauma, a lesion in the fabric of time,
or more precisely the trouble this lesion produces and which shows
itself as an extreme consciousness of time.17
For Hartman, Wordsworths poetry reveals that almost any place can be
charged, either in a positive mode of epiphanic or revelatory potential,
or in a negative mode of producing trauma through deferred action. On
the one hand, Wordsworths poetry describes a tree, a stone, or a ruined
cottage; on the other hand, the place becomes a point of connection or
contact with another time or place, remembered or imagined. As with
temporality, place can have a traumatic or blocking effect, yet this
effect is also intimately bound up with the possibility of poetic writing
or development.
The study of the Holocaust, however, leads Hartman to question
whether the often troubling memory places of Wordsworths poetry can
be unproblematically connected with the sites of Holocaust suffering. On
the one hand, the camps are clearly fixed in the imagination of survivors,
and so seem related to Wordsworths constructions, but Hartman resists
this identification: its difficult to think of the camps as being such
memory places.18 Survivor accounts often recollect the deportation to a
non-place (reinforced by the transportation across long distances) and
the destruction of a symbolic notion of place, which could make sense of
their experience. On the other hand, the former places of Jewish existence
destroyed in the Holocaust, the traditional locations of home and native
region, cannot be identified with memory places because they lack
the dynamism within individual memory of Wordsworths descriptions.
When asked to recall places of origin before the camps, survivors are
typically vague in their recollections perhaps because it is too painful to
recall while memories which do emerge tend to have the quality of fixed
or nostalgic recollections.
If Hartman resists the notion of the concentration camps as equivalent
to the Wordsworthian memory place, he is nevertheless drawn to the Yale
video-testimony archive as the closest point of connection, because it creates or restores a site of memory, and helps to reinvigorate fixed and inflexible memories with a renewed dynamism and energy. Hartman locates in
the video testimonies a modern venture of re-attaching the imagination to
collective memory. The Romantic period was marked by an enthusiasm
17
18

Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth, p. 171.

In Caruth, An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman, pp. 647648.

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for the imaginative lives of ordinary people; throughout Europe, collectors

and antiquarians sought to preserve oral traditions of songs, stories and
ballads, which were seen to be rapidly disappearing. Hartman observes
that the problem in the Romantic period was that the enthusiasm for the
oral tradition was too often bound up with a literary nationalism. The Yale
video-testimony archive is, for Hartman, based in the same oral tradition,
but by gathering witnesses from America, Israel and throughout Europe,
it seeks to avoid the dangers of a nationalist politics. In recording an experience which has been collectively endured, the video testimonies do not
discriminate within that community, allowing a voice only to a cultural
elite, but reflect a vernacular and heterogenous dimension.
Hartmans description of the video testimonies resonates with Wordsworths language in the Preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads. This connection is explicitly articulated by Hartman in the interview
with Caruth.
So in America many of the survivors are not people who could write
it down. But their speech nevertheless has a certain eloquence. It
has the pathos and vigor of the ordinary people Wordsworth tries to
evoke in the Lyrical Ballads.19
Wordsworth famously sought to use the real language of men, in order
to portray stories of struggle in adverse circumstances. He was not interested in educating the intellect by reason, but in producing a sympathetic
response in the reader. The widely acknowledged political and aesthetic
problem with the Lyrical Ballads is, that Wordsworth failed to convince
his readers of his claims to speak in place of the socially and economically disadvantaged; the poems arguably fail in their intention to give a
voice to the silenced and dispossessed. It seems, however, that Hartman
seeks to re-invigorate Wordsworths ideas, by suggesting that, in the
video testimonies, the voiceless are able to recover their own speech, or
to testify in a form with which we can readily identify. The main problem
with Hartmans comparison of video testimony with the Lyrical Ballads
is the notion of memory which is implied. Wordsworths poems rely on
emotion recollected in tranquillity; Hartman, however, is negotiating a
genre in which the very possibility of recollection is imperilled by the
catastrophic and overwhelming nature of the traumatic event. In identifying the video-testimony archive as a memory place, Hartman evokes not
only the preservation and recording of a rapidly disappearing past, but also
19

Ibid., p. 647.

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a more complex and dynamic act of remembrance, which allows the past
to emerge with its own rhythms, stumblings and hesitations.

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these audiovisual documents allow occasional spontaneous access

to the resurgence of memory as well as to significant details of daily
life and death, which history displaces and passes by. Memory is
allowed its own space, its own flow.20
In the face of such a troubled and troubling memory process, the sympathetic response of identification is stalled. In its place arise ethical considerations, regarding the nature of the relation between the primary and
secondary witness, which evoke questions of proximity and positioning,
and which seek to avoid the danger of replacing dialogic with monologic
witnessing.21
Landscape and vision
Hartmans reflections on the importance of Wordsworth to his own work
on trauma reveal a strong awareness of the cultural context of landscape
traditions. Fascinated by the historical position of Wordsworth at the origins of the landscape movement, Hartman suggests in The Unmediated
Vision (1954) that the lack of a tradition acts to remove from Wordsworths writing a defensive distancing apparent in later landscape poets,
and increases the risk and potential of trauma.22 Reading Wordsworths
obsessive and highly-charged descriptions of specific sites in terms of a
traumatic compulsion (spot syndrome), Hartman argues that such passages are characterized precisely by an unmediated vision, a dominance
of visuality which produces an impasse to development. For Hartman,
Wordsworths development as a poet was dependent upon the unblocking
of his obsessive visuality, drawing on, and extending the role of, nature as
a counterpointing force.
In discussing with Caruth the distancing effect of tradition on later
landscape poets, Hartman refers to tradition as a shield.23 Later in the
interview, Hartman refers to the pastoral as a shield, which is no longer
20
21

22
23

Geoffrey Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 92.
Dori Laub expresses a positive view of secondary trauma in Shoshana Felman and Dori
Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New
York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 5758. For Hartmans wariness of this, see
Hartman, The Longest Shadow, p. 165 n.10.
Geoffrey Hartman, The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins,
Rilke and Valery (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966).
In Caruth, An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman, p. 632.

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effective in the aftermath of the Holocaust.24 The convergence of terms

reveals a connection between Hartmans writing on unmediated vision in
Wordsworth, and his work on trauma; in particular, the notion of visuality
comes to the fore in his analysis of Spielbergs Schindlers List (1993).
Hartmans sense of unease with the film arises precisely out of the premium placed on visuality by Spielberg, manifested in an imperative to
make everything visible (Hartman 1996, 82).25 Drawing on his writing
on Wordsworth, Hartman argues that such a fixation on the visual acts
to produce an impasse, whereby the imagination, and the processes of
identification, cannot properly function. Hartman favours reticence and
advocates a language of witness or indirect disclosure, citing as examples
Lanzmanns Shoah (1985) and the Yale video-testimony archive. Such
works resist the tyranny of the eye26 Lanzmann, for example, famously
refused to incorporate archival footage into Shoah27 and so produce an
effect which is more semiotic than hypnotic.28
Hartmans analysis of Schindlers List draws out important questions
relating to the privileged position which is afforded to the viewer in relation to the events on screen.29 He points out that there are no convincing
attempts to portray the daily suffering in the camp or ghetto, or to give
personal or characterizing detail from the victims perspective. Emphasizing such aspects of the film as the mass actions and transports, the
action-movie pace of events, the neat binarization of Schindler and Goeth,
and the sentimentality of the ending, Hartman argues that the viewer is
positioned by Spielberg to watch the film with the eyes of those who had
the power of life and death.30 For Hartman, Spielbergs camera traps the
viewer in the same angle of vision as the Nazis, so that she derives a sense
of superiority from witnessing the crime from the comfort of a cinema,
without running any of the risks of victimization. From the all-surveying
perspective that the film provides, the viewer is led to imagine that she
can enter the Nazi field of vision, but in her overriding identification with
Schindler, she does not for a moment suppose she would have made the
Nazi choice.
The film initially appears to perform a similar function to that of landscape: the viewer is drawn into the territory and subsumed into a process of
24
25
26
27
28
29
30

Ibid., p. 651.
Hartman, The Longest Shadow, p. 24.
Ibid., p. 85.
For further discussion of the resistance to the visual in Shoah, see Felman in Felman
and Laub, Testimony, pp. 204283.
Hartman, The Longest Shadow, p. 92.
Ibid., p. 83.
Ibid., p. 83.

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increasing self-awareness through projection and identification. However,

Hartmans concern is that the conditions of viewing created by the film
may override alternative viewpoints which the viewer might otherwise
express. Hartmans point in relation to Schindlers List is not that there is
anything inherently wrong with visual representations. Rather, he is concerned that the film implicates the viewers gaze in a deeply problematic
perspective and does not allow her to locate her own bearings in relation
to the Holocaust. Hartmans reading seeks to counter the tyranny of the
eye, and to reflect not so much on what we see, as on the crucial questions
of how we see and from where we see. In other words, Hartman acts to
restore the uses and function of landscape, in self-reflexively positioning
the viewer, in relation to an ethical study of the Holocaust.
Conclusion
This article has sought to demonstrate the central place which Hartman
occupies in relation to trauma theory. The importance of Hartmans critical writing is that he introduces a spatial element to the study of memory;
drawing on Wordsworths poetry, he organizes his work on trauma around
a consideration of landscape and place. The importance of a spatial understanding of memory lies in the processes of positioning which it involves,
which necessarily engage with ethical questions of relation and proximity. In order to remember and mourn the past, we need first to be able
to position ourselves in relation to traumatic events, from which we are
increasingly distanced in temporal terms. Such a self-reflexive and responsive act of positioning necessarily precedes the work of commemoration.
Hartmans contribution to trauma theory lies in his determination to give
traumatic memory a place, whether this is explored through his readings
of Wordsworths spots of time, his reflections on the relation between
landscape and the memory of the Holocaust, or his work on the Yale videotestimony archive, which acts precisely for Hartman to provide a place for
the traumatic memories of the Holocaust.