‘Honour the real thing’: Shakespeare, Trauma and Titus Andronicus in South Africa

Summary

The turn to the traumatic has gained considerable currency in a range of humanities’ disciplines over the last fifteen years, alongside an increased popular usage of the term following the inclusion of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association in 1980. Trauma, which derives from the Greek τραύμα, literally meaning ‘wound’, denotes both a ‘wound, or external bodily injury in general’ (OED 1), and, in the context of developments in psychoanalysis and psychiatry, it emerges in the late nineteenth century as a ‘psychic injury, esp. one caused by emotional shock the memory of which is repressed and remains unhealed; an internal injury, esp. to the brain, which may result in a behavioural disorder of organic origin’ (OED 2a). The shift to the realm of the psychic, which can be traced through the work of John Erichsen, Jean-Martin Charcot, Sigmund Freud, Josef Breuer and, more recently, Dominick LaCapra, Cathy Caruth, Kirby Farrell, Ruth Leys and Ann Cvetkovich, among others, retains the language of the wound and injury but variously associates it with both behavioural responses to physical injury and, crucially for this article and work in the humanities, to ‘emotional shock’, the effects of which are still being felt. As Caruth summarizes, ‘trauma is described as the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena’. She goes on to argue that this opens a paradox in the traumatic experience: ‘that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it; that immediacy, paradoxically, may take the form of belatedness’.