.. per una selva oscura

The psychoanalyst Cathy Caruth begins her book The Wound and the Voice with a definition of trauma.  Like Freud before her, Caruth finds inspiration for that definition exactly where she should – in poetry. In Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme liberata, she reminds us, the hero Tancredi mistakenly and unknowingly kills his beloved, the woman-warrior Clorinda, in battle. The true horror of this event, in Caruth’s reading, is impossible for Tancredi to assimulate as it occurs; this lack of understanding is the very emblem of trauma. But that’s not all. When Tancredi later wanders through an enchanted wood, he happens to strike out, in panic, hitting a tree with his sword – the very tree where his lover’s spirit is trapped. In doing so, Tancredi releases her voice, and Clorinda appears to speak directly, from beyond the grave.

For Caruth, trauma is by definition an event which can be given voice only later, when a second, chance occurrence repeats an earlier wound, one which was too sudden, too far outside of all categories, to be taken in and understood in the moment. And when the Massachusetts Review decided to publish a special issue with the title Casualty, it was precisely this sort of experience we intended to capture. The original, root meaning of “casualty” is very close to the story Caruth tells. Centuries before it took on its modern sense, a “casualty” was a casual occurrence, a chance event, the very sort of accident that psychoanalysis sees in the root of trauma.

So when as you read through this issue, I hope you’ll think about Tancredi. I’d also like you to think about the power of literature to release the spirit, to give voice, to find beauty even in horror: remember Baudelaire’s exquisite, blossoming corpse. Now I don’t, of course, know much about the individual creative process of the wonderful artists and writers we’ve assembled in our Casualty issue, so I can’t tell if they do indeed wander through dark woods, sword in hand, striking blindly at everything in their path, until suddenly the spirit is released. I tend to imagine them more heroically – strapping on their armor, striding forth with intent, venturing more deeply into truly dangerous territory than the rest of us would dare.  In any case, what is essential here is that each gives new voice to the wounded, and allows them at last to be heard.