“The impediment that cannot say its name”: Stammering and Trauma in Selected American and British Texts

Abstract

The essay examines selected fictional representations of stammering in the context of trauma studies. The literature on stammering and the reports of sufferers suggest that the experiences connected with speech impediments must be regarded as traumatic. The therapeutic strategies to overcome trauma are usually concerned with the verbalization of the traumatic experience; psychoanalysts, narrative psychologists, and literary trauma studies highlight the need to exorcize the mental wounds with words. Stammering, however, is identified here as a special case, as a ‘perpetuated trauma’. The stammerer’s ability to give expression to his anxieties is limited, and so the wound is constantly reopened. Fiction can therefore be a means to couch the traumata connected with stammering in words. The writers discussed here, some of them suffering from a stammer, usually place the impediment in the context of power relations – language appears as a means of exerting power over others. Beyond that, the linguistic awareness triggered by speech impediments reveals the general inadequacy of language when it comes to organizing human experience. In this way, the individual traumata that attach themselves to stammering are turned into a chiffre for the general inability of language to structure the lives of human beings in a meaningful way.