Nightmares of Realism: "Working through" the dream-like characters of Traumatic Events

I am currently taking an independent study course on Trauma Narratives. I was surprised, not quite delighted, to see Northrop Frye mentioned in LaCapra’s Writing History, Writing Trauma. Personal Narratives, oftentimes out of psychological necessity, adopt a redemptive pattern of telling.

Such narratives “like” to fall into Northrop Fry’s classification of biblical archetype: paradise, the fall, and redemption. Whether you have a humanistic hope in social salvation, or one that works towards metaphysical transcendence, it is clear that this displacement of the biblical has appeal to both the reader and the author. LaCapra critiques Shindler’s list as offering a “Yellow Brick Road” in its ending, offering to redeem what was lost. But what if what is lost, is simply that?

Some critics of Trauma narratives, particularly in Holocaust Studies, say that any notion of redemption, within a “limit excess” situation, is not being true to the experience. Elie Wiesel’s eternal quest of asking “why?” is, to a great extent, in holding on to the dead—bringing them back into the conscious minds of the living. He carries this image of thanatos with him; It is poignantly recorded in Night: “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me” (109).

Some of Wiesel’s works stress “friendship” as the ladder out of the pits of Hades. But it is clear that a part of remembering the dead is keeping this gate or ladder clear for movement. Wiesel cannot simply shut the past behind, nor can he simply and neatly transcend into the “normalized” world we live in. I find it interesting that certain excess social-political situations begin to resemble the dream world when they are examined closely enough. This happens through obtaining the primary characteristics evident in dreams: appearances of the absurd, the nightmarish amoral, and the microcosm world which shuts in around itself—becoming a place almost outside of time, in a self-sealed vacuum. I’m not sure how much the psychological process of the victim has to do with archetypes, other than the mentioned; it is certain that psychic repetition can take place in healthy or less healthy modes.
These are patterns which, because they are so personal, are more difficult to say that they are simply displaced from somewhere else. Personal regression into the world of the dead can be a horrifying journey and confrontation. But that is part of the soul of the living, and survival and integration may require this descent. In some cases, working through the buried memories and placing them accurately in the past, present and future can give a victim a better understanding of the affectedness of these categories on each other. Should the past be “resurrected” in these real life dreams? Or is silence the most appropriate recollection?