All Our Children Trauma and Testimony in the Performance of Childhood

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All our lost children: Trauma and

testimony in the performance of

childhoodPatricia Pace a

a Associate Professor of Communication Arts and

Director of Theatre and Performance , Georgia Southern

University ,

Published online: 05 Jun 2009.

To cite this article: Patricia Pace (1998) All our lost children: Trauma and testimony

in the performance of childhood, Text and Performance Quarterly, 18:3, 233-247, DOI:

10.1080/10462939809366226

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Text and Performance Quarterly

18 (1998): 233 -247

All O ur Lost Children: Traum a and

Testimony in the Performance of Childhood

Patricia Pace

The testimony of trauma in Mary Karr s m emoir,

T h e l i a r ' s C l u b ,

is used as a rep resentative text

for an analysis of contemporary constructions of childhood. The child as a repository for the true self

with childhood as an end angered

space,

enacts comp lexities and contradictions central to subjectivity.

This paper also posits a theoretical framew ork for understanding childhood as performan ce.

eywords

childhood, performance, m emoir, traum a

Maybe bodies come to be ours when we recognize them as traumatic.

Peggy Phelan

My sharpest mem ory is of a single instant surround ed b y dark. I was seven, and our family

doctor knelt before m e w here I sat on a mattress on the b are floor. H e wore a yellow golf

shirt unbuttoned so that sprouts of hair showed in a V shape on his chest.... He was

pulling at the hem of my favorite nightg ow n-a pattern of Texas blue bonnets b unched into

nosegays tied with ribbon against a field of nappy white cotton. I had tucked my knees

under it to make a tent. He could easily have yanked the thing over my head with one

motion, but something made him gentle. "Show me the m arks," he said. "Com e on, now. I

won't hurt yo u . " . . . . It took three decades for that instant to unfreeze.

MaryKar r

Performance and Speech Act

t Mary Karr 's memoir The Liar s Club begins with this traum atic awakening

and continues the difficult story of her family's drama. Other contemporary

mem oirs abou t traumatic childhoods are related in Doro thy Allison's Bastard Out of

Carolina,

Frank McCourt's

Angela s

Ashes and Tobias Wolff's This Boy s Life. And,

although they are not strictly autobiographical, Eli Gottlieb's

The Boy Who Went

Away, Russell Banks' R ule of the Bone, and Kaye Gibbo ns' Ellen Foster feature child o r

adolescen t narrators who suffer at the hand s of their families. These bo oks suggest a

contemporary trend in the popular imagination: the child-self within or without the

family, and childhood itself, as a beleaguered and endang ered space. W hat is now a

truism in children's literature scholarship, that the child is constructed as Other-as

object of desire, as colonial subject, as a body under surveillance, as a symbol of

social decay^seems less evident in light of the many recently published books

which conflate the child's with the adult's consciousness. As Richard Flynn has

shown in his criticism on childhood in contemporary poetry, the doubled child/self

speaker in poetry is on e distinguishing feature of pos tmo dern subjectivity. H ow ma y

we com e to unde rstand the various discursive strategies surroun ding the figure of the

child in contemporary culture? My purpose is to investigate what performance

theory m ight offer in service of this project.

Patricia Pa ce is an Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Director of Theatre and Performance at G eorgia

Southern University.

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TEXT AND PERFORM ANCE QUARTERLY JULY 1998

In a 1992 issue of PMLA dedicated to the "Special Topic: Performance," John

Kronik in his Editor's Note articulates the paradigm shift which invites such

expansive application of performance knowledge. He writes: "What once was an

event has bec om e a critical category, now applied to every thing from a play to a war

to a meal. The performative . . . is a cultural act, a critical perspective, a political

intervention" (425). The concept of childhood has more differences from than

similarities to a play, a war o r a m eal; it is not a discrete bu t a tem poral event which

resists the framework we customarily apply even in anthropological investigations.

How then can a temporal event, organized as a "state" which is biological,

psychological and social, be com pared to a performance? Ch ildhood, like gend er, is

a biological category; however, childhood, like gender, is also psychological and

social and therefore constructed in and th rough signifying practices. W hat theorists

have taught us about understanding the gendered body may also speak to our

notions of childhood: that is, the child's body is not expressive, correlating to some

essential biological reality. Following Ju di th Butler's influential work on gender as

performance, the child's body is "performative, ... effectively constituting] the

identity [it] is said to express or reve al" (Butler, "Performative Acts," 279).

Butler's formulation may be familiar to many readers, but perhaps not in the

context of childhood . W e are accustomed to thinking of childho od as separate from

historical processes; the child's body is instead allied with nature, fixed and

authentic. But, as with anyone's body, there is no direct access to the child's body

excep t through lan guage. H ow does language act on the body? To clarify he r idea of

gender as speech act, Butler writes, "The performative ... maintains certain

comm onalities w ith the Althusserian notion of inte rp ell ati on .... In Althusser, it is

the police who hail the trespasser on the street: 'Hey, you there ' brings the subject

into sociality through a life-imbueing reprimand." The categories of gender, class,

race, sexuality, health or disease are ritually and transitively sedimented through

repetitive interpellation, as in the doctor's announcement "it's a girl," to "I now

pronounce you man and wife" ("Burning," 202-203). Not only do performatives

such as these authorize legal acts, but social categories are forcefully and performa-

tively inscribed, albeit with differences specific to historical m om ent an d geog raphica l/

cultural space. Lang uage does no t literally call the child into being , bu t "it is by being

interpellated w ithin the terms of language that a certain social existence of the b ody

first becomes possible" (Butler,

Excitable

Speech, 5). "N ot suitable for c hildre n," says

the marquee, and individuals are categorized, and have their movie viewing

surveyed and censored. But prior to this cultural proscription, the child's body is

made recognizable through linguistic modes of address. The performative speech

act, in J. L . Austin's formulation, affects an ac tion without explicitly acknowledging

the social pow er relations enacted in that naming .

2

Such a theoretical perspective m oves us from an analysis of the represen tation of

the child to an analysis of discourse a nd to ch ildhoo d as the designation of a class of

hum an beings. Im porta nt to Butler's argum ent is the idea that discourse has a history

that can be analyzed in relation to social actions and communicative gestures; for

example, "the ground of gendered identity" can be understood as "the stylized

repetition of acts throu gho ut ti m e" (Butler, "Performative Ac ts," 271). Like ge nder,

childhood is recognizable primarily in its sociality, in the communicative transac-

tions between the child and others. l ik e g ender, the develo pm ent of childhood has a

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discursive history; the litany of prohibitive disciplinary measures imposed on the

child's body effectively disputes our collective reification of the child's "nature" or

the ch ild's bo dy as outside of culture.

To return to Mary Karr's memoir: she represents herself as a child raised by

difficult and peculiar parents, from a working class family, a working oil family in

Leechfield, Te xas, 1961. Em bedd ed in her accou nt are descriptions which are

specific to her childhood and also specific to the construction of an historical

subjectivity. For exam ple, Kar r's recollections instruct us abo ut groom ing b ehav iors

and duties assigned to you ng girls but also tell of the intim acy shared by girl children

and women in the family: "I was sitting on the toilet waiting for my own bath and

fiddling with one of Grandma's hair clamps. Grandma had cocked her hip out and

leaned it against the bathroom sink while she crimped her lead-colored hair. She

used these steel clamps with little teeth tha t made deep marks on m y index finger as I

played with them. Grandma had told Lecia to rinse out Mother's stockings in the

si n k ... " (28). I'm not suggesting that we read m em oirs as docum entaries, bu t rather

that descriptions of childhood affirm that the subjectivity engaged w ith what we term

"private"—image, memory, identity-emerges from and within public, social, and

historically fluctuating formations like the family.

In this context, Richard Schechner's definition of performance as "restored

behavior" (35-116) instructs us to see childhood as manifest in social acts and

interactions. Restored behavior is that which is repeated or twice-enacted, an easy

enough idea when applied to a conventional theatrical performance. But no perfor-

mance of a play is exactly recreated. The rituals of childhood from child-rearing

practices to birthday parties are repeated events which generate specific cultural

meanings from and for social groups. As twice-repeated behavior, books for and

about children also contain enactments of childhood, in the events described and in

their m odes of description. O f special interest, as Jo se ph Ro ach observes, is that

"The paradox of the restoration of behavior lies in the phenomenon of repetition

itself: no action or sequence of actions may be performed exactly the same way

twice; they mu st be reinvented or recreated at each app earance. In this improvisa-

tory beha viora l space, mem ory reveals itself as im agina tion" (46). As an "improv isa-

tory behavioral space," performance as restored behavior is more than documen-

tary: it is "the transformation of experience through the renewal of its cultural

forms," a m om en t in "the perform ance of culture . . . of its m ost acute reflexivity,

when it attempts to exp lain an d justify itself to others" (Roach 47-48 ).

Performance's "repetition with a difference" speaks not only to the historical

configurations of childhood , rich in their various m eanings, but to the child-self with

which I began this essay. The child's experience of family life described in

contemporary novels reveals neglect, abuse, and abandonment differently than in

Charles Dick ens' time. Childhood space is characterized, almost hysterically, through

its violation by adults. Th e landscape of childhood b ecom es hallu cinato ry-the red

Big Chief writing tablet, the shoeb ox full of green stam p boo ks, the yellow ropes on a

felt cowgirl skirt, the headless Barbie-are undercut by events cruel and senseless.

Ju st as perform ance derives from and gives form to social space but remains elusive,

leaving its mark on psyche and b ody , childhood as well can be recollected on ly in

meditations and inscriptions. These novels and memoirs demonstrate a mode of

acute reflexivity for the narrator; childhood is constructed, retrieved, known only

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after the fact, in the perlocutionary utterance "And that's it, that's what I remem-

ber. ..." (Karr 139).

To the extent that we know our childhoods only in their imaginative reconstruc-

tion, the utterance "I rem em ber " no t only signals the act of going back in time, but it

is also the embo diment of the thing, "the m e a n in g .. . in this apparent coincidence of

signifying a nd ena cting " (Butler, "B urn ing ," 44). The im age of the child which b egan

this essay, which begins Karr's memoir, stands as an instance wherein we are made

spectator to the violation of the child's body. But the child's body becomes a

habitation for our own as the testimonial signifies a penetration from outside to

inside, exterior to interior, a movement toward a conscious body. The moment is

framed theatrically; "My sharpest memory is of a single instant surrounded by

dark." The darkness surrounding the child renders her an object of scrutiny for the

readers and for the author who constructs her

child-self,

a piercing of the body,

through a "sh arp " mem ory. Th e child's bo dy is small, isolated, the scene evoking a

cell or ward; "I was seven, and our family doctor knelt before me where I sat on a

mattress on the bare floor." The presence of the doctor at this initial moment in the

memoir brings to mind the Freudian doctor, the clinician who connects body and

psyche m uc h as the autho r will do in the course of her self-analysis. With the sight of

the doctor's "yellow golf shirt unbu tton ed so that sprouts of hair showed in a V sh ape

on his chest," we are reduced to child-size, made uncomfortable by the stark

physicality of the adult's bod y. In contrast to the do ctor, the child is dressed for be d

in "a pattern of Texas b lue-bonnets bu nche d into nosegays." This vision of feminine

childhood innocence is threatened because the doctor "[pulls] at the hem of my

favorite nightgown." In its excruciating detail, in the way the child's body is again

made object, we are implicated in this threatened violation, this exposure. The

doctor tugs at her hem , she bundles he r legs un der her gow n like a tent, and we fear

the child is about to be injured. From our experience with memoirs and other

confessional texts which document child abuse in our culture, we quickly code this

as a sign of some portending sexual injury. "He could easily have yanked the thing

over my head with one mo tion, bu t something m ade him g entle." Th e author knows

in retrospect m ore than the child, about vulnerability and the uses of pow er. But this

is a benevolent doctor, protective of the child and also steward to the adult, urging

the patient to return with him to the original trauma, prompting "Show me the

marks . . . I won 't hurt you."

To begin the m em oir with such an image is to construct a still pho tograp h of the

past carved out of time, which, like a photo, "render[s] it the subject of a new

nar rativ e" (Phelan 157). Ra ther tha n a story which progresses from beg inning to the

end , this narrative p rocee ds from end to beginn ing, engaging itself with questions of

causality and etiology. The memoir reverses history in an attempt to find that

m om ent of original injury, mu ch as an autopsy returns to the evidence of the body to

summon the truth.

3

We return, in Peggy Phelan's words, in "the possibility that

something substantial can be made from the outline left after the body has disap-

peared" (3). While we recoil from the taboo invoked by the details of abuse, the

marks on the child's body constructed by the " I rem em ber " are one form we give to

our own m ourning.

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designation of the child to the realm of the private self. The categorization of

children as a specialized class can be seen as an effect of modernity and part of a

far-reaching and revolutionary social change. Viviana Zelizer's research demon-

strates the profound change in the status of the child which occu rred betw een 1870

and the 1930's and the complex socio-economic pressures which influenced the

reformation of childhood. In 18th century America, children were important

contributors to both agricultural work and growing urban industrialization; later, in

disputes about child labor and public safety, they were reconceptualized as depen-

dent, with value placed on child love rather than child labor and a comcomitant

separation between workplace and child space. The economically useful child was

transformed into the emotionally priceless child because of specific economic and

demographic pressures accompanied by a "moral revolution" which affected all

social spaces and practices from labo r to law to education to adop tion. As the child

was increasingly sentimentalized, that is deemed extra-commercium (outside of the

marketplace), she gained value as an object of love, sacred in and of herself. W hile

removing children from the labor force was a result of market incentives, until

recently the sentimentalization of childhood appeared to operate as a force against

market values. Acco rding to the prevailing formula the mo netary value assigned to

goods increases their worth; if children deemed "priceless" are also highly valued,

then a mo ral, altruistic critique must develop in addition to the econom ic paradigm .

Much as child advocates featured the orphans and the laboring children of the

19th cen tury, the abuse d or missing child acts as a persuasive symbol for activists of

the left and the right in the 20th century. W e've all seen the photo grap hs of children

with the ir vital statistics, listed on the milk carton, poster, po st office wall—"Have you

seen me? CALL 1-800-843-5678, the National Center for Missing and Exploited

Ch ildren " (Ivy 226-227 ). According to a survey conducted by Gelles and Strauss "in

1978 only one in ten Americans thought child sexual abuse was a serious social

prob lem. Yet by 1982, nine o ut of ten peop le thought that child abuse was serious"

(in Ivy 233). Actua l violence against ch ildren surely exists, howe ver statistics indicate

that the outcry about missing children-u sually p resented as kidn apped rando mly in

some sordid and grisly circumstance-is misdirected. As in the sad case of child

murder in Union, South Carolina, "the great majority of missing children are

abducted by family members, usually one of the parents involved in a custody

disp ute" (Ivy 231). Kincaid's research indicates that the re exists no ev idence at all of

a large child-pornography industry and even less evidence of a cause and effect

relationship between pornography and molestation. He argues further that child

molestation cases in child care institutions are most often revealed as witch-hunts,

and that the "F agin's wo rld" c reated by crime d ram as is as fictitious as the nefarious

land of bad boys and bad ends we remember as the ominous Pleasure Island of

Disney's Pinnochio (359-394). The focus on the child as an object of abuse in day care

centers, in sensationalized Satanic ritual cases and in celebrity trials all conve rge on

the traumatized child as a powerful locus of cultural anxiety.

Public hysteria about abuse draws our attention away from the real crime: despite

unprecedented technological and scientific advances, one in five children live in

poverty in America and children still starve to death in countries around the world.

In spite of the organizations intent on protecting children from abuse, we have

"systemic, society-wide mistreatment of children through class, race and gender

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exploitation." An d underfunded agencies cannot adequately protect children, where

"Americans are more likely to be killed and assaulted in the home by a family

m em ber than anyw here else" (Ivy 231,233 ). Deb ates over the chemical castration of

sex offenders, for example, substitute for proactive policies protecting children

against the largest category of sex offenders, adults within the family. And, the

multiple discourses which hail the child as endangered sexual object displace other

social and econo mic responsibilities tow ard children.

The case for new social and family policy proposed by thinkers as divergent as

Neil Postman and Germaine Greer, Dan Quayle and Hillary Clinton proves the

extent to which the idealized child provides the necessary binary opposite to the

endangered child. Childhood can be conceptualized as "endangered" only if the

my tholog y of childhood retains its mo nolithic status. Heath observes how the title of

M s.

Cl in ton ' s book , It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us, d e m o n -

strates the paralyzing features of our debate over childhood. Even in a moving plea

for child rights, Hillary portrays Chelsea and herself "[going] back to the natural

roots of things, [learning] from their travels in South Asia the need of the modern

world for the re-creation of the 'traditional village' " (19). By m aking childhood into

a last bastion of innocence in a world gone wrong, the figure of child "always

already" p ortend s the fallen adult.

As Marilyn Ivy documents, this view of the child is normalized in the rhetoric of

the dysfunctional family, wherein "w e're all adult children either d oing our work of

recovery or in need of it." Self-help leaders like Charles Whitfield characterize the

child as a hid den aspect of the adult, at once "frightened" and "w on dro us" and in

nee d of rescue. While the child is conceptualized as "savior" and "ch am pio n" it is,

paradoxically, "w ou nd ed" and "tox ic." Always imposed on the figure of the child is

the imprint of the corrupt adult, as if the past can only be conceived as simulta-

neously edenic and contam inated (in Ivy 237-241 ).

Clearly, contem porary rhetoric utilizes the puer eternalis to culturally specific en ds ;

J.M . Barrie's Victorian boy P eter Pan , "the G reat W hite Father," escapes growing up

alone w hile his alter-ego (the adult) H oo k faces the jaws of death . Steven Spielberg's

Peter, an idealized figure for ou r age, is at once child and m an, a corpo rate pirate and

toy-crazy child, free to consume adventureland.

6

Ivy interprets the rhetoric of the

lost, bu t treasu red child in legal, psychological, and popu lar discourse as a response

to the crisis inhera nt in late capitalism:

"Ch ildren are the most intensely targeted ma rket segmen t in the United States today, with

the entire spectrum of embodied desires overtly managed by capitalist enterprises. The

realities of late twentieth-century America mean that children must often be kept in day

care centers, away from h om e . . . ; that the child is sexualized in consumer capitalism; and

that consumer capitalism targets the child as the ideal model of the impulsive addicted

buyer. Thus it is not surprising that conversely the child must be maintained as sexually

innocent, at home, and as the model of the non-addicted self in American popular

culture" (234).

Childhood is constructed as an innocent sanctified space independent from the

economics of late-capitalism which really do threaten children. Conversely, child-

ho od as a com mo dity is available to us all, beck onin g in the guise of the " true self,

purchase d through the tap e, boo k or worksho p (memory for sale). This view is so

pervasive it invades even the analysis of childhood undertaken by Marxist scholar

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Susan W illis. In h er view, child ren (like the proletariat?) find Utopian an d subversive

uses for technological transformer toys, Barbie dolls and mini-kitchens, thereby

escaping the constraints of consumer consciousness.

Keeping in mind Ivy's important insight, that these discursive strategies are

basically conservative and work to camouflage and mask cultural contradictions

surrounding childhood, what can we learn from the traumatic testimonies in

contemporary novels? According to the 1987 APA's clinical definition of trauma,

"The person has experienced an event that is outside the range of human experi-

ence."

7

In he r analysis of the therape utic trea tm ent of traum atic illness, Laura Brow n

argues that such a definition derives from those experiences theorized as outside of

male human experience, ignoring the myriad types of trauma which are actually

forms of the dominant culture perpetuated in its institutional practices (100, 102).

These would include cases of victimization and sexual injury characterized by

unequal power relations, including child abuse, hate crimes, sexual harrassment,

rape, assault, and incest. Rather than understanding these events as aberrant,

accidental or uncustomary, the pervasiveness of testimony in its public form seems

to contradict any notion of traum a as uniqu e in hum an e xperienc e. T he testimony of

child sexual abuse in particular is so widespread as to be ubiquitous, seeming to

indicate tha t sexual victimization h as beco m e alm ost a rite of initiation for child ren

in our culture. Without relying on Freud's uneasy resolution that incest is a fantasy

integral to the development of the child's erotic being, and without presuming to

affirm or question specific instances of child sexual abuse, we can nevertheless look

to the meaning of such experiences within an ongoing discursive construction of

childhood.

Kai Ericson remin ds us that the medical usage of word "trau m a" m eans " a blow to

the tissues of the body," a definition tellingly blurred in therapeutic usage wherein

traum a has com e to me an a state of mind (184). Th e assault on the bo dy is psychic as

well as phys ical, collective as well as priva te. As Phelan understa nds it, the psy che is

"subject to w ound s, to tears, to traum as. W e believe it can be m ade h ealthy. W e treat

it, in short, as a bo dy " (5). Th e contem porary self is metaphorized as a pathological

body waiting diagnosis and repair; and the traumatized child-self is but one of a

multiplicity of discourses-religious, med ical, legal, and corp orate -w hich attemp t to

fill up the excav ated b od y witfi its gaping holes and woun ds. In the painful,

excruciating repetitive recoun ting of childhood as traum atic event we find a cultural

self-definition; a meaning of childhood performed as a radical doubleness; the

meaning of childhood is performed as profoundly liminal-not child and not

adult-bu t one and both wounded and commem orated.

Trauma and Testimony

Early in the twentieth century the figure of the performing bo dy and the language

of traum a were yok ed in Fre ud 's original psychoanalysis of wom en hysterics (1895).

A related focus on th e bod y an d the evocation of m em ory characterizes Proust's A la

recherche

du temps perdu

(1908-1922) and Stanislavski's ac tor's exercises in sense

me m ory (1936). W e might also remem ber that psychoanalysis was "inv ente d" at the

same time as cinema, a medium and a technology which enables memory to find a

temporal form.

8

Like theatre, cinema and other forms of cultural performance,

psychoanalysis does not unproblematically provide access to memory but rather

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looks to the body for interpretations and meanings leading to the "truth" of

experience.

Most recently, questions about mem ory and the bod y have entered contemporary

discourse

in

conflicts around children's accusations

of

sexual abuse, recovered

mem ories, multiple personality disorder, and even the truth of eye-witness acco unts

in trials generated

by

traumatic events,

(the

Anita Hill hearings

and

Nazi

War

Criminal proceedings,

for

example).

9

The

legacy

of

Freud's talking cure, self-help

and self-disclosure,

are

central

to

m any forms

of

public d iscourse;

on the

other han d,

unresolved issues about the reproducability of events cloud our view. Because

remembering is a daily part of our inner lives, we view the urge to record as a

question of verisimilitude or docum entation.

Therapists make a useful distinction between narrative memory and traumatic

mem ory. Traumatic m emory

is

disassociative, unassim ilated into one's life history,

overwhelming; as such it remains singular and unchanging, lacking a social dimen -

sion.

The

subject

in

trauma canno t speak until narrative allows

the

subject

to

locate

trauma within

a

temporal history. Narrative memory

is

addressed

to

another,

and

like other narratives, constitutes

a

social

act

wh ich reconciles indiv idual desires with

communal imperatives.

10

From this perspective, the discourse of the traumatized

child must elicit me anings and interpretations from within the context of historically

and culturally specific values and prac tices . Specifically, the child is understood to

embody the "true self, a discursive effect strategically deployed to designate the

inner, em otional life; traum a reconstructed

in

narrative emerges

in

opp osition

to

this

idea

of an

authentic self

and

designates

a

public self conceived

as

fundamentally

alien, unhe althy

and

dangerous.

Similar to the religious confession, which was for Foucault evidence of the

subject's internalization of the discipline imposed by the church and the state,

testimony

may be

understood

as an

effect

of the

dominant culture. While

the

memoir

may

recoun t acts

of

transgression within

the

family

and

around

the

figure

of

the child,

the

speaker's self-inspection

per se, her

participation

in the

discursive

ritual, marks m od ern identity. The testimony , as Foucault o bserves of the confession,

is

a

ritual

of

discourse

in

which

the

speaking subject

is

also

the

subject

of the

statement" (61). The public account of the private sexual victimization negates the

speaker's status as victim while simultaneously displaying the traces of culture's

powerful sovereignty over the speaking subject; introspection may be said to display

the discipline imposed

by the self.

If ours

is the age of

testimony ,

as

Shosho na Felman says,

we are all

implicated

as

witnesses.

The act of

testimony m ust

be

und erstood

in the

context

of our

will

to

listen

and believe and in the implicit contract between speaker and audience. Ex cavating

traumatic secrets, as Freud knew, requires an audience because it takes two to

witness

the

unconscious,"

and to

conjure

it too

(Felman

24). The

practice

of

testimony as a speech act constitutes a vow to tell, to be ar witness to an implied or

actual addressee and to present evidence of the real. So long as it is a medium of

personal revelation,

the

adult's body, symptomatically speaking

its

distress,

is

understood

to

retain

and

emanate

the

guilelessness

of the

child's body.

As in a

theatrical performance,

one of the

implicit conventions

of the

testimony

is

that

the

individual's affective experience of the body can be authentically com mu nicated.

In an essay about her memoir-writing, Mary Karr characterizes herself as a less

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242


than willing interlocutor, reluctantly putting aside beloved poetry to write prose

under the pressure of financial crisis. "The Art of the Self, she apologizes, is

narcissism, "the moral equivalent of black lung" for the writer. Attempting to

de-mystify the writer's process, she nevertheless submits that "my subjects have

chosen m e, rather than the other way a ro u n d .. . . Simply put, the book w as standing

in line for m e to write it" ("Apology" 96, 107). In this dram a of the self, the speaker

must o vercome obstacles imposed by the limitations of the reme mb ering self and the

deceptions of others, in Karr's wo rds; "Few bo rn liars ever intentionally em bark in

truth's direction, even those w ho believe that such a jou rne y might axiomatically set

them free. Several times, I had flown to Texas ready to push against the figurative

door of the past. But the resistance I met was both invisible and fierce" (311). The

search for truth is constructed as a moral imperative; "born liars" must be trans-

formed into "truth tellers." Her family resists this reformation; "In [Lecia's] world

... people who whined about their childhood were woosies, ne'er-do-well liberals

seeking to defraud the insurance industry out of dollars for worthless therapies"

(311). T he speaker's conviction that past knowledge both constitutes and empo wers

the self becomes her weapon; "[My therapist] pointed out that they weren't cruel

questions. In m y family lingo, though , they were. Mo re than mean , they might p rove

lethal" (312).

As a testimonial about childhood trauma,

The Liar s

Club reflexively interrogates

the tension between lies and truth, mem ory and fiction; the scene of traum a be com es

a stage for the speaking b od y. Its subject matte r is the lies adults tell to children and

the pain caused by their dissembling, half-truths a nd om issions. W e are ac custom ed

to censo ring our life-stories for c hildren , but to b elieve a child wo uld lie constitutes a

grave offense, tantam ount to disbelieving in childhoo d itself. May be our relative lack

of scholarly attention to the culture of childh ood reflects a co mm on fear; to make the

mistake of not-believing a child is to betray ch ildhood innocen ce and ingenuousness,

like the adult skepticism that banishes Santa Claus and Tinkerbell. This interdiction

also colors our responses to the testimonies of adult survivors of childhood abuse. In

our haste to use testimony as a conservation of the pas t or as a vehicle for healing , we

tend to think of language as instrumental, without acknowledging its mediating,

performative aspect.

As a construction of childhood, K arr's writing explores dim ensions we can term

historic, political, therapeutic and poetic. Historic descriptions speak of the child's

relationship to local events in the family a nd in the com mu nity. No t only are such

events referenced in recalled actions (the Normandy invasion, the Gulf Oil strike,

Gran dm a's leg amputation), but also in details of the general landscap e an d in the

catalogue of objects and im ages from childhood (the huge W est Tex as sky dotted by

blue-black clouds, Golden Books from the super-market, fifteen-cent hamburgers).

Events which are political speak to relations of power between children and adults

and institutions (the sheriff who removes the children from their parents, the honor

of being the only child or wom an allowed at the gathering of the Liar's Club in th e

back ro om at Fisher's Bait Shop). W hile the mem oir itself has a therapeu tic function,

descriptions of deviance or transgression are specific instances of the therape utic; for

example, abuse by a baby sitter the child interprets as "punishment for some

badness I did-s carin g D add y off, m ayb e. Or no t having the guts to go with him. O r

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24 3


weighing on M other's m ind till she couldn 't paint a lick and flat lost he r mind and set

fire to the wh ole w orld" (245).

Unlike testimonials on the talk show or in therapy, Karr's memoir constitutes a

literary speech act and so self-consciously merges p roblem s of poetic discovery with

problems of self-discovery. In her essay on the memorist's task, she breaks the

para grap h in to poetic lines to illustrate her nego tiation of the language:

"Flipping back the lid unleashed no winged demons,

only the smell of wet newsprint,

like a paper you'd picked off a dew-soaked lawn.

The top tray held a scattering of sepia

photos and letters tied with twine.

I also found four jewelry boxes

lined up neat as soldiers. Two were covered

in black velvet, one in royal-blue satin,

another in deep raspberry grosgrain.

Each clicked wide to show some version

of a wedding ring,

The family jewels, I figu red...." ("Apologist," 103).

Karr finds much to criticize concerning the privileging of information over poetic

language, but she notes among other poetic features of her prose, the repetition of

sounds (flipping, lid, winged, newsprint), alliteratives (unleashed no winged de-

mons), and the staccato rhythms achieved by the line breaks. Karr's memoir resists

reduction to historical event because it is engaged in the formal aesthetics of

composition. We are presented with a testimony which narrates the unspeakable

me mo ry, the trauma, while confessing that mem ories about child hoo d-lucid , quick-

ened with insight and deep feeling-may lie. The self is understood as a formal

construction like any finely crafted story, subject to the limitations of languag e. Th e

speaker discovers that "All the black crimes we believed ourselves guilty of were

myths, stories we'd cobbled together out of fear. We expected no good news

interspersed with the bad. Only the dark aspect of any story sank in. I never knew

despair could l ie" (320).

To summarize, testimony employs dimensions which are historic, political,

therapeutic and possibly poetic, bu t in every case characterized b y " . . . the writer's

readiness to become himself a medium of the testimony—and a medium of the

accident-in his unshakeable conviction that the accident ... carries historical

significance which goes beyond the individual" (Felman 31). Karr's testimony

displays traces of a subjectivity m arked by p articular responses to recogn ized, he nce

emblematic, events of our time-alcoholism and mental illness, separation and

divorce, family secrets, survival. Her story is as much her parents' as her own, and

like m any family stories, carries within it a history seemingly impossible for o ne to

imagine, much less to end ure. As a mo de of performative discourse, her testimony

"ena cts some thing in excess of the thing that motivates it" (Phelan 12). The story and

the events within belong to the autho r, but the story speaks for us, is a symptom of a

childhood with meaning in excess of specific families and specific children.

Here we return to the traumatized body, in Mary Karr's imagining, restored by

truth, "like the legendary grace that carries a broken body past all manner of

monsters" (320). Broken bodies like those which proliferate in the artifacts and

images of our time-the opened and displayed bodies in the transgressive photo-

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graphs of Rob ert M app lethorp e, the sexual injuries that are no t redressed b y law, the

spectator's enco unter w ith the dying AID S body , the catastrophic bod ies of perfor-

mance art-act as forceful oppositions to the idealized child's body. "Unlike the

perfect blue-red body of my childhood anatomy book,"

11

the testimony of child-

hood trauma, its property as a performative discourse, likewise tears open the

self-contained body of the child because it is "a textual testimony which can

pen etrat e us like an actual life" (Garuth 14). Like the performanc es Phelan insight-

fully interrogates in her Mourning Sex, the testimony of child traum a confronts a loss;

"it enacts the difficult force of a grief which simultaneously mourns the lost object

and ourselves. Inside and outside" (153). T he story of "our insides," penetrated by

the spoken evidence of traum a, penetrated by the eye of the artist and the audience,

revisits an d rep eats the story of our subjectivity.

In Karr's mem oir, the lost object (the child, ourselves an d not-ourselves) instigates

her performative elaboration, our interpretation of her symp toms, and our collabo-

rative identification with he r

grief.

So it won't "spoil the story " if I disclose the secret

at the core of Karr's family plot, ordinary as it sounds in my recounting of it: her

mother had two other children, Tex and Belinda. Circumstances had compelled

Charlie Marie Karr to give them up; they were lost to her in an unimaginable

scenario terrifying for a child to contemplate. "And if they could be lost-two whole

children, born of Mother's body just like us-so might we be. To believe that she'd

lost those kids was to believe tha t on any day ou r moth er could vanish from our lives,

back into the void she came from, tha t we could beco m e an other secret she kept."

Karr's am nesia abo ut this po tent piece of family information, " an erasure that held

for nineteen years," motivates her reconstruction of childhood and in so doing,

rehearses a series of other traumatic separations, her mother's hospitalization for

being "Nervous," her parents' separation and divorce, her father's death (Karr,

Liar s,

80 ,

79).

Like an image in a d ream , the ghost-like figures of the lost children

illuminate the traumatic event without recounting it in a linear manner. Rather,

Karr's testimon y reverses time, returning to an originary m om ent of loss, and, again,

repetitively rehearsing traumatic instances spanning time from the child's "w ho le"

bod y to the wo unde d an d dim inished body of the adult.

Traumatic memories, as several scholars understand them, are events in which

"no trace of a registration of any kind is left in the p sych e; instead, a void, a hole is

found:" traum a "precludes its registration . . . is a record that has yet to be m ad e" (in

Caruth 6). Th e me mo ir as a testimony of traumatic event returns to childhood in an

effort to restore meaning to the subject, to mend the tear in the body by rehearsing

the losses, mourning, and healing by which we measure our psychic life. The

conclusion to

The Liar s

Club suggests that perhaps all memories are conjuring acts,

performances, lies. Beginning with the figurative moment of consciousness (the

wounded child), and ending with the flight of the body into pure spirit, the story of

life is ultimately a rehearsal for loss:

I'm thinking of the cool tunnel of white light the spirit might fly into at death, o r so some

have rep orted after com ing back from various car wrecks and heart failures and drownings,

courtesy of defib paddles and electricity, or after some kneeling Samaritan's breath was

blown into stalled lungs so they could gasp again. Maybe such reports are just death's

neurological netw orks, the brain 's last light show. If so, that's a lie I can live with (320).

The lost children in Karr's memoir emerge as a loss more traumatic than her

sexual injuries. Those violations she recounts for an angry reckoning with "Hey,

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245

TEXT

AND

PERFORMANCE QUARTERLY PATRICIA PACE

bucko

. . .

Probably

you

thought

I

forgot wh at

you did, or you

figured

it

was

no big

deal. I say this now across long decades and thousands of miles solely to remind you

of

the

long m emory

my

da ddy always said

I had (Liar s

66).

But,

Belinda

and Tex

are more than the abandon ed b rother and sister in a child's nightma re of a shadow

family. As I have said, they display our longings for the excavations and autopsies of

our lost

and

aband on ed childhood selves, performatively con structed

as our

" true"

selves. Butler writes that The effects of performatives, understood as discursive

productions, do not conclude at the terminus of a given statement or utterance, the

passing

of

legislation,

the

announcement

of a

bir th" [Bodies 241). Real children,

discursively hailed as sexually incipient, en dangere d, respositories of the private and

the emotional, subject

to

histories

we

can no t ever w holly possess, have suffered

the

consequences in families and in social policy. From Wordsworth's romantic wise

child to the presumably kidnapped and eternally young faces peering from milk

cartons,

the

ways

we

live childhood

as a

performed meaning have

a

concrete

connection to the ways we interact w ith children in the world.

Notes

1Some representative theoretical analyses of the representation of the child are found in Avery, Kincaid, Nodelman ,

Pace.

2 J L Austin designates perlocutionary acts as performative; "those we bring about or achieve by saying som ething"

(108). Butler and LaCour expand on Austin's formulation.

3 I am much indebted to Peggy Phelan's discussion of the performance of mourning in her Mourning Sex. See

particularly

her

reference

on 157.

4 See Heath for an analysis of literary and philosop hical influences on the roma ntic child.

5 Fo r the most influential tre atme nt of the child as reflection of adult desires see Jacqu eline Rose.

6 For a comparison of Barrie's Peter Pan with S pielberg's re-invention of Peter in Hook, see Pace, "Rob ert Bly Does

Peter Pan."

7 Brown notes at th e end of her article the mo re rece nt version of the A PA 's clinical definition; "post-trau matic stress

disorder will no longer require that an event be infrequent, unusual, or outside of a mythical human norm of

expe rience" (111). This revision acknowledges that certain kinds of traumatic events are not infrequent but does not

address the impo rtant questions as to why the traumatic ev ent appears to be a consequence of culture itself.

8 For a comprehensive discussion of the tempo rality of film as medium, see Phelan 158.

9 Schacter discusses all of these phenom enon as well as organic manifestations of mem ory, trauma and memory loss.

10 The distinction is made by Van Der Kolk and Der Hart; "T raumatic m emory is inflexible and invariable.

Traumatic memory has no social compon ent: it is not addressed to anybod y" (163).

11Phelan makes

the

distinction between

the

anatomy book,

the

discourse

of

science,

to the

symptomatic bodies

which speak

of

"the body's flaws... clanky cranky body

and

dea th" (21).

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Documents

All Our Children Trauma and Testimony in the Performance of Childhood