Waltz with Bashir: between representation and experience

How to represent extreme, traumatic experience has long been a predicament in social science and literary criticism. This quandary is sometimes dealt with by claiming that such experiences are forgotten or leave their victims claiming they have had experiences that are too horrific to represent. This explanation leads to the position that representation is distinctly different from experience, and indeed insufficient by comparison. Waltz with Bashir (Folman 2008) is a recent text (at once a feature-length animated documentary film and a graphic novel) that deliberately employs a riotous combination of 'languages' of representation to probe the apparent inadequacies of language for representing extreme, traumatic experience. The aim of this article is to utilise Folman's text to challenge this apparently rigid distinction between experience and representation, and demonstrate the possibility of representation standing in for or becoming experience. Profoundly blurring the boundary between experience and representation in this way facilitates a richer explanation of the case of memory loss due to trauma and allows the recouping of some experiences that have previously been thought of as too horrific to represent. As a representation of an experience that he cannot remember, Folman's text, constituted largely through others' representations of the same events, becomes a substitute for his own lost experience. This text becomes both Folman's experience and his representation of events that were too traumatic for him to integrate at the time of their occurrence (the Lebanese War of 1982). Zizek's insistence on representation as a necessary part of the experience of violence and the experience of violence as needing to be indirect and inclusive of distance are drawn upon to enrich the explanation of what happens in memory loss. Here memory loss after 'unrepresentable, horrifying experiences' is referred to, where access to experience is usually thought of as hindered by the inadequacies of representation. As such, the representational techniques used in Waltz with Bashir combine to form a lavish literary trace - somewhere between experience and representation. This enables the construction of an inaccurate and fractured, yet intense and authentic version of well-known traumatic events that can be utilised in seeking a meaningful account of these occurrences.