Trauma and Literature: The Case of Christopher Smart

Abstract: This essay explores how Jubilate Agno responds to a situation analogous to trauma and mania—although its coordinates are as much historical and linguistic as psychological—in which poetic self-presentation is so thwarted as to verge on aphasia. Smart's poem circumvents social and other curtailments of speech by finding undeveloped expressive powers in language and the semiotic process: a mode of representation that Smart called "sound reasoning." Hartman traces this sound reasoning through key sequences on language in Jubilate Agno , showing how it turns coprolalia and other dysphemic utterances into euphasia, or perpetual praising. His argument locates Smart's breakthrough in relation to eighteenth-century and more recent literary and critical developments, especially thought about linguistic "purity."