Why do artworks addressing catastrophes and violence often reconstruct the event rather than depicting it directly—sometimes even against documentary accuracy? This question lies at the heart of the discourse surrounding the experience of difficult trauma through art. If documentary photography promises a testimony but proves powerless before the ineffable, then art—from Goya’s etchings to Jeff Wall’s light installations—offers a different strategy: it does not «reflect» trauma, but rather creates a form for its impossibility of being claimed by the viewer. We will examine how this idea unfolds in the works of three authors: L. S. Vygotsky, Cathy Caruth, and Susan Sontag.
Lev Vygotsky, in «The Psychology of Art,» describes the mechanism of catharsis not as a calming process, but as a «discharge, destruction, and transformation into opposites» of affects. For Vygotsky, catharsis arises from the contradiction between form and content: the artist uses form to «extinguish» destructive material, and this very mismatch produces the aesthetic response. Art, therefore, does not «re-live» pain—it melts it into a form that makes the experience possible without being traumatic.
Cathy Caruth radicalizes this issue. In her theory, trauma is not merely an event but «the inability of an event to acquire meaning, to become part of consciousness.» The traumatic image «says: you must see, but you cannot know.» From this arises the thesis of unspeakability: direct testimony is impossible, and the artistic representation of trauma is always paradoxical. However, Caruth does not deny art its function: «trauma is not just a pathology, but a way or attempt to express truth.» Literature and art become a space where the unspeakable takes on an indirect form—through omission, rupture, or construction.
Susan Sontag addresses the same issue from a different angle in Regarding the Pain of Others—through a critique of documentary photography. She argues that «when it comes to photographs, everyone becomes a literalist, ” yet documentary evidence is most often staged (Fenton, Beato, Kapra). Furthermore, a viewer’s sympathy does not guarantee understanding: „By sympathizing, we are declaring both our innocence and our powerlessness.“ Therefore, in the book’s conclusion, Sontag turns to a work that is not a document—Jeff Wall’s The Dead Soldiers (1992). This is a staged scene: the Canadian artist was never in Afghanistan, and the figures were shot in a studio. But it is this very construction that allows for the conveyance of something the document cannot: the dead soldiers are preoccupied with themselves; they are not seeking our gaze. „The dead soldiers are not talking. Here, they are engaged in this.“ Sontag calls the work „the opposite of a document, ” and in this paradox lies the precision—art does not feign testimony, but creates a form for the impossibility of testimony.
