The Traumatic Imagination: Histories of Violence in Magical Realist Fiction [1 ed.] 9781604977776, 2011025313

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The Traumatic Imagination

The Traumatic Imagination HISTORIES OF VIOLENCE IN MAGICAL REALIST FICTION

Eugene L. Arva

Copyright 2011 Eugene L. Arva All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to: [email protected], or mailed to: Cambria Press 20 Northpointe Parkway, Suite 188 Amherst, NY 14228 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Arva, Eugene L. The traumatic imagination : histories of violence in magical realist fiction / Eugene L. Arva. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60497-777-6 1. Magic realism (Literature) 2. Psychic trauma in literature. 3. Fiction—20th century—History and criticism. I. Title. PN56.M24A78 2011 809.3’915—dc23 2011025313

To Árva Jenö for planting the first thought, in memoriam, and to Árva Anna Mária for keeping the faith alive

TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword Wendy B. Faris Acknowledgments Introduction: Writing Horror: Traumatic Imagination and Magical Realism

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1

Chapter 1: Living with Trauma: The Uncanny Reality of Shock Chronotopes

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Chapter 2: Writing the Vanishing Real: Hyperreality and Magical Realism

61

Chapter 3: Writing Pain and Magic: Magical Realism as Postmodern Fantasy

83

Chapter 4: “Who Am I and Where Is My Country and Where Do I Belong?”: Surviving Slavery

117

Chapter 5: “Handcuffed to History”: Surviving Colonialism

173

Chapter 6: “How Can We Eat and Drink When so Many Have Perished?”: Surviving the Holocaust

217

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Chapter 7: “Confronting Ending Itself, Many Repeated Endings”: Surviving War

243

Conclusion: The Missing Link: Trauma, Imagination, and Magic

281

Endnotes

289

Bibliography

307

Index

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FOREWORD

The literary mode of magical realism continues to thrive worldwide— despite predictions of its extinction. This book contributes to the growing body of critical thought on magical realism, which, beginning with the seminal articles by Stephen Slemon and Edna Aizenberg on magical realism as postcolonial discourse, analyzes the cultural work that magical realism has been doing. And like Anne Hegerfeldt’s recent book, Lies that Tell the Truth, on magical realism in Britain, by integrating postcolonial and metropolitan texts, Eugene Arva’s study shows that magical realism is not only a postcolonial phenomenon but also belongs in meaningful ways to world literature in all cultural contexts, especially those having experienced trauma of one kind or another. Because magical realism includes fantastical––magical––events, it has occasionally come under fire recently as an escapist genre. In this study, Eugene Arva takes on this accusation and refutes it by showing in considerable theoretical and textual detail how magical realism (in his words) “rewrites the vanishing real,” and thereby makes traumatic events of history, which have been repressed because they were too horrific to

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confront, available to the reader. He discusses the way in which magical realism enables writers to exercise what he calls the “traumatic imagination,” through which they express aspects of historical trauma that have been suppressed. As he explains, the traumatic imagination transforms traumatic memories into narrative memories and integrates them into what he calls an artistic shock chronotope. This is another term he has coined (using Bakhtin’s idea of chronotope) to suggest the way in which magical realist writing brings forth events that, because they exceeded a subject’s capacities for assimilation and narrative, have been repressed through shock. In the course of articulating his own theory, Arva contextualizes magical realism critically, availing himself of a number of other psychological and cultural theories. The perspective of trauma studies integrates not only postcolonial and metropolitan sites but also negotiates the intersection of public and private, synthesizing fruitfully both social and psychological nuances. He links Freud’s idea of the uncanny as something that appears in connection with an event that was too difficult for a person to assimilate with magical realism’s inclusion of nonrealistic events and images, and uses that idea, together with the notion of trauma, which causes an event to be suppressed, to begin to describe how magical realism reconstructs history via nonmimetic imagery, and thereby makes historical atrocity present for readers to experience. In his second chapter, which locates magical realism within postmodern writing, Arva deals with Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra, among other ideas, and distinguishes magical realist texts from Baudrillard’s hyperreality, which he sees as oversaturated with facts and information. Starting from those and other theoretical bases, he selects novels from three historical situations in order to demonstrate in more detail how magical realism reconstructs history in order to deal with trauma. His treatment of Caribbean slavery in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World, and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem illustrates how the characters and narrators of these texts use their traumatic imaginations to confront impossible situations.

Foreword

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Next comes an insightful discussion of images of colonial and postcolonial trauma in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. In order to explain how García Márquez is able to use his traumatic imagination fruitfully to create magical realist texts, even though he himself had not experienced major trauma, for example, Arva locates García Márquez’s writing within both the frames of the violencia in Colombia and Spanish colonialism. The penultimate example of the magical realist traumatic imagination at work is taken from two novels depicting the Nazi holocaust, Joseph Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon and Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer. While Arva recognizes the significant differences between the historical events involved, he makes a convincing argument that magical realism indeed provides a widespread and fruitful textual strategy for reliving and dealing with historical trauma. The last chapter takes up two narratives whose authors were closer to the traumatic wartime events represented in their novels, Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, and Tim O’Brien’s Going after Cacciato. Arva studies the way in which the fractured narrative voice of Grass’s narrator, alternating between first- and third-person viewpoints, embodies a traumatized self, one that is suspended between innocence and guilt, and how Grass infuses the text with magical images to depict Oskar’s unusual wartime experiences. He then compares this magical narrative of trauma with O’Brien’s, analyzing the similar position of Cacciato’s narrator, and the way he deals with the discomfort resulting from such a position by creating a magical alternative reality. In short, through such analyses of texts from widely differing historical contexts, this approach to magical realism through ideas associated with trauma studies enlarges our understanding of the cultural work magical realism continues to do in contemporary world literature. –Wendy B. Faris, University of Texas at Arlington

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The first thoughts that have led to this project started their journey about a decade ago. Inspiration came from a few writers and scholars whom I was privileged to meet and work with for several years, and many others whom I had come to know through their writings. I owe the discovery of most of the sources present in this work to my former professors from the Graduate School of the University of Miami. I feel particularly indebted to Michael Rothberg, who showed me the turbulent locus where literary theory meets trauma studies; Frank Stringfellow, who made me understand psychoanalysis and its theoretical applications beyond the limits to which Freud could possibly have intended for us to take them; Frank Palmeri and Russ Castronovo, who introduced me to contemporary literary, social, and aesthetic theories without which this would certainly be a different work; Lindsey Tucker, who helped me see the light amidst the aporia of postmodernist fiction; Robert Antoni, who got me hooked on Faulkner, García Márquez, and the myth-making process of magical realism; and Lester Goran, who taught me that writing, “good” writing, has nothing to do with reality, and everything to do with the writer’s imagination.

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Over the years, my erratic thinking processes and convoluted writing habits benefited from the careful guidance of Patrick McCarthy and Joseph Alkana from the University of Miami, as well as Wendy Faris from the University of Texas at Arlington. I am grateful not only for their insightful commentaries and conscientious editing, but also for their unrelenting trust and ongoing friendship. When two years ago the going got tough in academia, my good friends Alan Gravano and Peter Cramer made it their mission to keep me from losing heart. Haunted by the demons of my own past, I could not have written about trauma without the love and moral support of my parents, Jenö and Anna Mária, to whom I dedicate this work.

The Traumatic Imagination

INTRODUCTION

WRITING HORROR TRAUMATIC IMAGINATION AND MAGICAL REALISM Events characterized by extreme violence and/or extended states of fear and anxiety tend to resist rationalization and interpretation in a narrative form because of their powerful and lasting impact on the human psyche. However, traumatization, albeit of a different type and intensity, may also be incurred by indirect or mediated experiences of violent events, such as listening to survivors’ (or trauma patients’) stories, watching war documentaries, films, and news footage, as well as reading trauma narratives. The concepts of vicarious traumatization and transgenerational trauma have constituted the fulcrum of the present project since its inception in early 2003, when, coincidentally, the United States invaded Iraq in order to “finish” a war started twelve years earlier, which, in its turn, had allegedly put to rest, as the media hype of the day went, the demons haunting America’s collective memory since yet another “unfinished” war of twenty-odd years before, named after a Southeast Asian country. Television brought all three wars into the living rooms

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of the global audience, without deliberately aiming for, but certainly achieving, a twofold psychological effect: first, “authentic” violence was made available to secondary witnessing thousands of miles away from the battlefield, inducing different degrees of psychic numbing in viewers; and second, a feeling of reassurance (it is happening there and not here, to them and not to us) was conveyed by the surreal incongruity of the images, their intriguing non-conformity to “normality.” However, the images, run and rerun by the media day in and day out, shocking in the beginning and unnervingly obsessive later, gradually turned “normal”: war planes dropping their deadly load on what seemed like uninhabited jungles; burning villages; helicopters evacuating the wounded and the dead; bleeding, terrified, gaunt-looking human beings—the enemy; and then, more than two decades later, video images of buildings suddenly turning into puffs of smoke; ships launching “smart” missiles; tanks and humvees rolling across an endless desert; explosions and tracers lighting up the night sky over cities; and again gaunt-looking human beings with their hands tied behind their backs—the enemy. The normality of combat zones: not everyone was in the war, but most of us felt at war. Traumatization by witnessing does not necessarily require one’s physical presence at, or direct exposure to, an extreme event, spatially or temporally; what matters is the feeling incurred by experiencing the event in one way or another: through oral accounts, written narratives, or audiovisual media. Nevertheless, secondary or tertiary witnessing cannot and should not be treated on an equal plane with firsthand witnessing, nor can bearing witness by proxy ever be granted the same degree of authority to which survivors’ and victims’ accounts are entitled. Most of us remember Vietnam, Desert Storm, and Iraqi Freedom from images similar to the ones described earlier; few of us have ever had the opportunity to listen to primary witnesses’ accounts, and even fewer have actually experienced the heat of jungle or desert battles. Most writers discussed in this study (with two exceptions, Günter Grass and Tim O’Brien) have not directly experienced the violent time-spaces—or shock chronotopes—that they re-created in their works. Evidently, the phrase “authentic vicarious experience” is in itself an oxymoron of

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sorts; and yet, the repetition of violent images (by the media or other means) does tend to create a spatio-temporality in its own right and, in a way, “authentic” experiences from the audience’s point of view. A spectator (viewer, listener, or reader) will thus develop what Thomas Elsaesser calls a “prosthetic memory” and, on a case-by-case basis, “prosthetic trauma,” which will result in a subconscious overlap of different temporalities in the spectator’s perception of reality: “Besides involving repetition and iteration, the traumatic event intimately links several temporalities, making them coexist within the same perceptual or somatic field, so much so that the very distinction between psychic time and chronological time seems suspended” (“Postmodernism as Mourning Work” 197). Other theorists have shared this point of view in the past few years as well, initiating a meaningful dialogue about the legitimacy and sources of secondary witnessing and vicarious traumatization, ultimately leading toward analyses of literary works as trauma work. In 2005, for instance, E. Ann Kaplan argued that “the reader or viewer of stories or films about traumatic situations may be constituted through vicarious or secondary trauma” and that “most of us most of the time experience trauma in the ‘secondary’ rather than direct position” (39). This line of inquiry is not altogether new; Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Ellul, Paul Virilio, and Slavoj Žižek, to name only a few, have already discussed the impact of visual media on both the individual and the collective consciousness in different types of arguments and contexts (not all trauma-related) for more than two decades. Etiologically, however, visually mediated trauma is not the only type of psychic wounding; among other sources of trauma, Kaplan also mentioned “reading a trauma narrative and constructing visual images of semantic data…” (91). I claim that vicarious traumatization is not always solely the result of reading a trauma narrative but also—and more important from a literary-artistic perspective—the cause for writing one. Magical realism, as a mode of writing and not as a canonical genre restricted to a certain geography, culture, or literary trend, has become one of the most effective, albeit controversial, artistic media to re-present extreme events since its beginnings in the early twentieth century.

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(Unlike representation, which involves some degree of interpretation, re-presentation captures the feel of a limit experience, not the facts. Because of its shocking impact on the psyche, a limit experience cannot usually be assimilated and stored as a narrative memory by consciousness, remaining confined to its limits as a latent traumatic memory.) Viewed in the larger context of postmodernist fiction, magical realist writing foregrounds and at the same time transgresses the traditional borders between reality and imagination by rearranging apparently antithetical ontological levels within the literary text: the logically and perceptually verifiable everyday reality, on the one hand, and the sensorially ungraspable and unexplainable phenomena of the supernatural on the other. Over more than half a century now, magical realist language has demonstrated its versatility by affecting literary productions belonging to various cultural spaces and representing different histories of violence. The oxymoronic character of the term magical realism has often been pointed out by critics, who have also been careful to justify its meaning according to the perceived functionality of the writing mode. For example, Christopher Warnes defends the oxymoron by deeming it “an appropriate condition given that it designates a narrative strategy that stretches or ruptures altogether the boundaries of reality” (vi); Homi Bhabha describes the writing mode as “the literary language of the emergent postcolonial world,” a function that this work deals with more specifically and extensively in Chapter 5; and Fredric Jameson considers magical realism “a possible alternative to the narrative logic of contemporary postmodernism” (Warnes 1). Significantly, none of the quoted theorists refer to magical realism as a literary genre in its own right, but they all seem to situate the “literary language” or “narrative strategy” at the very core of postcolonial and postmodernist writing. At the other end of the spectrum, however, are the skeptics like Jean Franco, for whom magical realism is only “a little more than a brand name for exoticism” (Warnes 1). Alfred J. López also questions the legitimacy of the term, which he considers a “European term applied to a non-European literature” and “a futile European attempt to categorize and thus ‘understand’ it by this process of naming […] to ‘master’ the other’s difficult text?” (quoted in Wen-chin 15).

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Establishing a nexus between magical realist writing (viewed primarily as a postmodern literary phenomenon) and trauma (understood as an individual and as an often invisible cultural dominant) requires an interdisciplinary conceptual tool; the term that I propose, “traumatic imagination,” is intended to describe an empathy-driven consciousness that enables authors and readers to act out and/or work through trauma by means of magical realist images. I posit that the traumatic imagination is responsible for the production of many literary texts that struggle to re-present the unpresentable and, ultimately, to reconstruct events whose forgetting has proved just as unbearable as their remembering. The traumatic imagination is also the essential consciousness of survival to which the psyche resorts when confronted with the impossibility of remembering limit events and with the resulting compulsive repetition of images of violence and loss. * The concept of trauma has evolved from its original meaning of physical injury to that of psychological disorder and, more recently, to that of cultural phenomenon. In my analyses of four violent historical events—slavery, colonialism, the Holocaust, and war—I refer to these flickering time-space indicators as “shock chronotopes,” borrowing the term “chronotope” (time-space) from Mikhail Bakhtin and adding the “shock” component in the sense it carried in “shell-shock,” the World War I phrase for what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). When the overwhelming violence of an event prevents it from being rationalized and archived in the subject’s consciousness as it occurs, the traumatic time-space (the shock chronotope) is so shaky that making it artistically visible (turning it into an artistic chronotope) requires an act of imagination, which I call traumatic. Magical realist writing should be regarded not as an escape from horrific historical “facts” or as a distortion meant to make them more cognitively or emotionally palatable but rather as one of the most effective means of re-creating, transmitting, and ultimately coping with painful traumatic memories. In such a context, the re-presented or reconstructed truth will not be of what actually happened

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but of what was experienced as happening. The traumatic imagination transforms individual and collective traumatic memories into narrative memories and integrates them into an artistic shock chronotope. Shock chronotopes are prone to reveal the intrinsically uncanny reality of traumatic events—histories that were and were not at the same time: they were, because more or less verifiable facts may attest their taking place; and they were not, because none of the events ever came to be stored in a coherent narrative memory, having eluded, at the very moment of its occurrence, the subject’s cognitive capabilities. Even if an event looks or sounds unreal, it has nevertheless come into being in a realistic context with real causes. As strange as the world of unfamiliar phenomena might seem at first glance, its simultaneous perception as familiar intriguingly suggests that it is, in fact, not a parallel universe or a world “beyond” but very much part and parcel of our “real” reality. Consequently, while a chronotope may seem quite real, its flicker (caused by repressed memories) will still convey strangeness and fear— the combination that makes the mind hesitate, delay its responses, and plunge into a state of uncertainty. Magical realism, as a mode of textual representation, gives traumatic events an expression that traditional realism could not, seemingly because magical realist images and traumatized subjects share the same ontological ground, being part of a reality that is constantly escaping witnessing through telling. Coping with an extreme state of uncertainty, as in an experience of the uncanny, is also characteristic of dealing with trauma. Whether the author is a primary witness of the extreme event or not, chances are that readers become secondary or tertiary witnesses of sorts, and possibly vicariously traumatized by the narrated events. However, being traumatized by proxy is not the same as being a victim: by transgressing the boundaries of verisimilitude, the magical realist text may both convey the authors’ empathy (through their narrators and/ or characters) and at the same time induce empathy on the part of the readers—not by appropriating the victims’ voices but, rather, by making them heard for the first time. And even if the extreme events which the text re-creates can be neither understood nor represented (in the

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traditional, mimetic sense) as a coherent history, magical realist writing takes on the daunting task of reconstructing history in order to bring it closer to the readers’ conceptual system and their affective world. * The magical realist effect has its roots in the reader-text relationship, and draws its exceptional suggestiveness from the apparently oxymoronic pairing of the real and the imaginary in this interaction. “The possible and the magic/imaginary subvert and open up the borders of the real. Both the real and the potential or the conceivable are rendered as ‘consorting together’ and enjoying the same level of legitimacy” (Manzanas, “Romance” 57). Indeed, the cohabitation of what is with what could be, of the natural with the supernatural, of the logical with the unexplainable, would not make reality magical in such a seamless manner if these antithetical elements were not treated on equal footing by narrators, characters, and readers. As with most postmodernist writing, the textualization of the reader is crucial in exposing all three sides of the mirror: the opaque, the reflective, and the reflected. In her 2004 study on magical realism as a literary and a cinematic narrative, Maggie Ann Bowers recognizes the narrative mode as “an intimate affair between the reader/viewer and the text/film” (128). Besides emphasizing the reader’s, or the viewer’s, role in the relationship, Bowers also points—in a somewhat defensive manner—to a larger applicability of magical realist theory than the exclusive domain of literature: “Far from being simply a fashionable narrative device, magic(al) realism has proved itself through the criticism it has generated to stimulate consideration of the relationship of fiction and representation to reality” (128). Indeed, as a postmodernist phenomenon, magical realism operates as a versatile and self-reflective mode of reality representation. Early- and mid-twentieth-century theorists, including Walter Benjamin and Situationists such as Guy Debord, have tried to explain a world made of representations, whose multilayered reproductions of reality seem to be constantly eluding us. According to Debord, for instance, “spectacle” is not merely “representation,” something related to “show,”

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“performance,” or just an assemblage of images, but “rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images”; in the society of the spectacle, “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation” (12). I believe that the spectacle, as the “heart of society’s real unreality” (13), is in fact both the object and the medium of the magical realist narrative: although perceived as supernatural and out of this world, the magical realist image is nevertheless accepted by the reader as just another component of his or her “verifiable” world, an attribute that has itself undergone important semantic changes in the past few decades. Therefore, Ana María Manzanas’s rhetorical question targeting the present status of the real/imaginary dichotomy is relevant for our future understanding of magical realism: “If the real verges on what has traditionally been considered the unreal, and the tangible is made up of almost intangible entities such as atoms, protons, electrons, and quarks, then what becomes of the imaginary and the magical?” The critic’s conclusion that “many zones of the imaginary no longer stand in an oxymoronic relationship to the real, for the oxymoron is dispelled in the open arena of the possible and the heterogeneous” (“Romance” 59) may evidently prompt a quo-vadis type of reflection about the consistency of future magical realist texts, whose main narrative strength used to be founded on the very inconsistency of their ontological structure—on the oxymoronic cohabitation of the real and the imaginary. If what we now call reality is just as unverifiable by our senses as the supernatural, could it be that the realism in magical realism is coming around full circle, headed back for the Aristotelian representation model of mimesis? The answer is likely to be found in twentieth-century representation theories. By the 1980s, Debord’s society of the spectacle has further morphed into Jean Baudrillard’s world of simulacra. For Baudrillard, society is past the moment of the spectacle because of the gradual loss of all referent: what is left is just simulation, that is, “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (1). On the other hand, according to Slavoj Žižek, it is our passion for the thrill of reality that might also prompt us to avoid it (Desert of the Real 9–10). Viewed from

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this perspective, we are all virtual magical realists, even to the point where our reality (signs, codes, messages) becomes more “real” than the Real we constantly try to recapture. Thus, the hyperreal is nothing but a spectacle without origins, very much like magical realism is the representation of events (seemingly) without a history, or the re-creation of an absence that first needs to be acknowledged before it can be assigned any meaning. However, magical realism creates more than just a depthless hyperreal, a multilayered reality of images of other images without any original referents. In a number of cases, magical realist hyperreality is meant to be a reconstruction, a re-presentation, of events that were “missed” in the first place because of their traumatic nature. Magical realist hyperreality is an affective (empathic) kind of reality, capable of bringing the pain and the horror home into the reader’s affective world: while it might not need to explain the unspeakable event (and perhaps, it neither could nor should), it can certainly make it felt and re-experienced in a vicarious way. If fairy tales, fantasy, and science fiction require the suspension of the reader’s disbelief as the sine qua non of the literary experience, magical realism, on the contrary, expects the reader to keep aware of its textual constructs and accept them as part of his or her “real” reality, as unreal as they may seem. Although realistic details may render images believable to readers, traditional realism usually stumbles at their transmission as reflections of rational, understandable experiences. Slavery, colonialism, the Holocaust, and war have constituted themselves as “histories” of extreme events hardly open to rational reflection or understanding. I consider the traumatic imagination as an expression of the consciousness of survival that so many authors of violent histories have come to share. While drawing on concepts such as collective memory and transgenerational trauma, my analyses do not approach the shock chronotopes of slavery, colonialism, the Holocaust, and war from a comparative perspective but, rather, within individualized historical contexts characterized by a common socio-cultural marker: trauma. Without setting up a dialogue between historical memories, I view memory as multidirectional, a term recently proposed and defined by Michael Rothberg.

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The critic suggests that “we consider memory as multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative,” and calls the “interaction of different historical memories” multidirectional memory (Multidirectional Memory 3). Rothberg’s argument rests on the widespread scholarly use of Holocaust memory as a steppingstone toward analyses of other previous or later histories of violence through borrowing and cross-referencing, and on the willful overuse and overemphasis of its uniqueness: “The emergence of Holocaust memory on a global scale has contributed to the articulation of other histories—some of them predating the Nazi genocide, such as slavery, and others taking place later, such as the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) or the genocide in Bosnia during the 1990s” (Multidirectional Memory 6). On an individual level, memory cross-referencing can also create screen memories (or Deckerrinerungen, Freud’s original term), that is, a more recent memory can replace an older memory, usually a more painful one. Conversely, in the case of several authors that I discuss here (Jean Rhys, Maryse Condé, Günter Grass, and Tim O’Brien), representing historical trauma (vicariously experienced in the first two cases and directly in the other two) constitutes a means of both covering up and working through a personal trauma of one kind or another. * I have chosen three Caribbean novels as case studies for the effectiveness of magical realist imagery in evoking the shock chronotope of slavery: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World, and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. To the characters and narrators of these texts, the tragic inaccessibility of both motherland and adoptive country leaves them with no other possibility of expression than the magical language of imagination. As the recently departed Édouard Glissant wrote, “Slavery is a struggle with no witnesses,” so that a “real” communication of its horrors will most likely never take place. For more than half a century now, Caribbean writers have been “writing their world into existence” (Caribbean

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Discourse 161), that is, defining the cultural identity of the geographical space in which they were born, which most of them left in their youths, and to which they never ceased to return throughout their lives. If Rhys re-creates history through intertextual experiments, Carpentier makes recourse to supernatural elements in order to reinvest it with a new kind of reality, and Condé brings history to life from official documents by making her protagonist use the power of magic and witchcraft. In spite of their implied truth value, facts, statistics, and numbers cannot produce the same kind of affects as events reconstructed through artistic images can. By virtue of their general purposes, historical records usually encompass the entire picture of a chronotope and order events in as intelligible a manner as possible; consequently, they often read as depthless, demystified narratives. However, when it comes to human lives, “truth” can rarely be used in the singular because it can never be squeezed into clear, logical, and unambiguous statements. Carpentier, Rhys, and Condé break down the official truth on record into individual fictional dramas that bring characters and events closer to the readers’ feelings. The artistic image of Carpentier’s language, for instance, is a linguistic hybrid (Bakhtin’s phrase): it belongs both to the linguistic consciousness of the author, whom I presume to be vicariously traumatized (based on biographic evidence), and to the linguistic consciousness of the represented victims, the actually traumatized and silenced slaves. The symbolic mediation in Carpentier’s text (the transfer between reality and the symbolic) takes place in two stages: first, Columbus’s letters and writings by different nineteenth-century authors transferred the reality of the actual chronotope (slavery) into different modes of representation; and second, Carpentier’s novel actually translates an already represented reality into artistic images. In this magical realist text, simulation results in an affective simulacrum, a reproduction with more color and depth to it than the original referent itself—thus, a simulacrum altogether different from Baudrillard’s shallow images that deny reality its “vital illusion” (its usually ambiguous signification). The stories of Macandal and Bouckman, the leaders of Haiti’s most important slave uprisings,

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and of Henri Christophe, post-independence Haiti’s first black ruler, are told from the point of view of the protagonist, Ti Noël. In spite of Macandal’s and Ti Noël’s metamorphoses into birds, insects, and other natural elements—alternatively symbolizing either an escape from or an expansion of their human condition—Haiti will continue to be plagued by violence, pain, and suffering, with no end in sight. If Carpentier’s artistic chronotope seems to perpetuate historical trauma, it is also a way of working through it. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Jean Rhys’s intertextual supplementation of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre (1847), is a challenging portrayal of post-slavery Jamaica, viewed through the eyes of the main character, Antoinette, a descendant of the Creole slaveholder class. Historical trauma in Rhys’s novel is experienced as individual loss, affecting the hybrid identities of Antoinette and her mother, Mrs. Cosway; and as cultural loss, resulting from the identity erasures of both an uprooted race (the African slaves) and a newly disenfranchised social group (the Jamaican white creoles). The relationship between Antoinette and her English husband (ironically, “bought” for her and paid for with her own dowry) fails tragically because of an unavoidable culture clash: the young Jamaican Creole’s personality is not only imbued with the mystery and magic of the islands but also marred by individual and historical trauma (she avoids talking about the insanity running in her family or about the atrocities of slavery, fearing that, if mentioned, they might become true). Her husband, on the other hand, a literary alter ego of Rochester, Brontë’s male protagonist, rejects any adaptation to Antoinette’s culture, and implicitly any understanding of her character, because he is apparently too afraid to cope with the strangeness of her environment and its mysterious, untold history. Like Carpentier’s The Kingdom of this World, Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is an expression of the traumatic imagination, a traumatic narrative that may be viewed either as Rhys’s way of working through the trauma of a cultural displacement in childhood or as an expression of acting out a trauma of loss from which she failed to distance herself. In reality, the difference between these two fundamental modes of dealing with trauma is not so marked: sometimes

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there might be a certain degree of awareness in the process of acting out trauma just as at other times working through trauma may occur outside one’s consciousness. Nevertheless, as an attempt to signify trauma, or what Lacan and Žižek call a hole in the chain of signification, Rhys’s novel can be read as a narrative that writes, rather than writes about, historical trauma. Trauma enters Condé’s novel I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1986) just as abruptly as it usually strikes in real life: her protagonist and narrator, Tituba, is born of an instance of violence when her mother, Abena, is raped by a sailor on the ship taking her to slavery—an episode symbolic of the historical rape and abuse of her entire race. The historical realeme (Brian McHale’s phrase), the real-life person called Tituba, was the only black defendant in the Salem witch trials. Much like Carpentier, who witnessed Haitian slavery by proxy, through his readings, Condé uses her knowledge of the seventeenth-century Anglophone Caribbean and historical documents from the Massachusetts Bay colony to give voice to a historically neglected realeme: the character of Tituba comes to life in her pages as part of an artistic shock chronotope, slavery, whose reallife referent had entirely foreclosed the voices of its victims. Through the workings of Condé’s and her readers’ traumatic imaginations, magical realist writing evokes a shock chronotope by investing it with affect. Symbolically, Tituba becomes the prosopopoeia of a revitalized history, a naming of trauma itself. Violence and magic are ubiquitous in Condé’s narrative. Images of physical violence alternate with unexplainable events: the extraordinary enters the everyday and undermines its coherence, while its affect can quite easily traumatize readers. Scenes of hangings, rape, and torture are balanced in the emotional economy of the narrative by scenes of tenderness, love-making, healing, contemplation, and reflection on human nature. Besides the kind of metamorphoses used by Carpentier, Condé introduces ghosts several times in her narrative, but not as menacing spirits bent on haunting the living as they were in the Gothic literary tradition: magical realist ghosts are friendly, wisdom-dispensing physical entities who can be touched, hugged, and caressed by those who can transcend the ontological barrier between the

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reality of the senses and that of the imagination. It takes a certain kind of person, like Tituba or her mentor, Mama Yaya, to be able to see and hear them, as well as to listen and talk to them. Besides physical survival, surviving slavery also implies keeping the real story alive, the one that re-creates past traumatic events by attaching them to present affects and making them matter to the modern consciousness. Remembering the horrors of the past amounts to more than paying homage to the memories of their victims: it is also an identity-forming and healing act that entails confronting the unspeakable and coming to terms with trauma. * Chapter 5 focuses on images of colonial and postcolonial trauma incorporated in the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1980). A brief analysis of la violencia (the period in Colombian history between the late 1940s and the mid 1960s) reveals it as the historical result of a much older shock chronotope: Spanish colonialism. Considering that García Márquez has not directly experienced any of the traumatic events that he re-presents in One Hundred Years of Solitude, I posit that his secondary witnessing and attempt at working through a vicariously induced trauma found expression through a traumatic type of imagination. On April 9, 1948, when Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a Liberal politician, was assassinated, García Márquez was a law student at the National University in Bogotá, and eventually he spent the years of la violencia in Colombia’s Caribbean region. The author’s vicarious traumatization (by second-hand witnessing) may explain the frequent allusions to death through unnatural signs or persistent smells in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Besides analyzing different magical realist images in the novel, I focus on those indicative of psychic numbing, repressed memories, and the impossibility of telling. Among these, one scene of extreme violence stands out and projects the suggestive potential of magical realist writing: the massacre of three thousand striking workers of the banana company by government soldiers. The historical

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realeme took place in Ciénaga, on the night of December 5, 1928, after General Carlos Cortés Vargas was informed that the government had declared a state of siege in the banana zone. Historical records of the event each indicate a different number of casualties. In the novel, José Arcadio Segundo, one of the two survivors who can bear witness to the massacre, speaks of more than three thousand corpses; however, the exact number (even if an indicator of the size of the violence) loses its importance in the context of the overwhelming feeling of horror that traumatizes the survivors. What worsens the character’s trauma will be the eventual impossibility of telling about the violent death of so many: it is not so much the speech act, the utterance itself, that makes bearing witness impossible but the absence of a receptive audience willing to listen. In order to suggest the traumatizing effect of witnessing the shooting of thousands of people, García Márquez uses a kind of language that some have described as allegorical and others as poetic; I recognize in it the understated magical realist rendering of traumatic violence. Under conditions of overwhelming physical violence, language fails; and when it eventually tries to recapture the missed referent, it inevitably resorts to the traumatic imagination. Similarly to García Márquez, Rushdie uses the voice of the colonized and the language of the colonizer embedded in magical realist images in his 1980 novel Midnight’s Children in order to give life to a chronotope he has not experienced directly. Any unacknowledged loss or absence (caused by historical or structural trauma, respectively) can be traced and reconstituted by the traumatic imagination and turned into narrative memory by authors and their readers. Saleem Sinai, the narrator and protagonist in Rushdie’s novel, sees himself as fatefully tied toand endowed with special powers over—post-independence India’s history. In Rushdie’s postmodern reconstruction of history, Saleem’s birth at midnight on August 15, 1947, actually marks the emergence of modern, independent India. However, by the end of the novel, after having portrayed himself as an agent of history, Saleem ends up as one of its millions of victims. Saleem’s “handcuffing” to India’s history suggests precisely his lack of agency and, on a larger scale, the submission of

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the colonial subject to a situation outside his control. If Saleem believes that he is the one determining the course of the new nation (in itself a contentious concept throughout the narrative), it is because he displays a compulsion to repeat unpleasant events (mostly historical ones) in order to gain control over them after they have already happened. Saleem is acting out historical trauma while, in the process of writing, the author is working through transgenerational trauma. Besides pointing out the latent trauma caused by two centuries of colonial oppression and an erasure of cultural identity, I analyze a scene of extreme physical violence, quite similar to the massacre of the striking banana workers in One Hundred Years of Solitude. However, unlike García Márquez’s third-person narrator, Rushdie’s first-person storyteller, Saleem, deliberately uses exact historical dates in order to deceive readers by giving his narrative an air of authenticity. The killing in Rushdie’s novel takes place on April 13, 1919, twenty-eight years before Saleem’s birth, when Brigadier R. E. Dyer, the Martial Law Commander of Amritsar, orders his troops to open fire on peaceful, unarmed demonstrators. Saleem recounts the event by using the point of view of his grandfather, the primary witness. The language of the scene shows the same attention to detail as in García Márquez and a similar recovery of an original trauma. Rushdie’s best magical realist scenes involve the 581 midnight’s children born on the same night as Saleem and the activities in which they use their supernatural powers. Magical images come to underscore postcolonial traumatization and Saleem’s unstable hybrid identity. Rushdie and García Márquez try to heal historical wounds by rewriting history itself. Whether their myths are called India or Macondo, the authors take on colonial (and postcolonial) traumata by having their characters start anew with a clean slate. Both novels serve as warnings that a human community, whether an entire nation or a village, may have a future only after it has given meaning to its past. * The chapter dedicated to the most horrific chronotope in human history, the Nazi genocide, analyzes Joseph Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon

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(1997) and Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer (1966). Although the two Jewish-American authors did not witness the Holocaust firsthand, they re-create its horrors in their novels by relying on their traumatic imaginations. Most critics of post-Holocaust writing tend to question the authority of a writer’s voice by his ethnicity and/or the nature of his connection to the event. Malamud’s novel is set in Czarist Russia, in 1911 Kiev, and its plot was inspired by the historic Mendel Beilis blood libel trial. By prolepsis, Malamud connects early twentieth-century anti-Semitism to the crimes of Nazi Germany that followed only a few decades later: the arbitrary arrest of the novel’s main character, Yakov Bok, his two-and-a-half years of abusive detention, and the concocted accusations to which he is subjected are all harbingers of the atrocities of the Holocaust. In spite of its preponderantly realistic scenes, the narrative incorporates a number of fantasy elements particularly in the last scenes of the prison episode: a succession of dream sequences tends to blur the borderline between reality and imagination as readers are given little or no notice of the shifts between the two ontological levels of the text—an ambiguity characteristic of magical realist writing. Fantasy has the suggestive power of making the reality of the plot more vivid in the readers’ eyes. Malamud seems to be aware of the importance of illusion in our perceptions of the world: when in one of his out-of-this-world experiences Yakov shoots Czar Nicholas the Second, he actually proposes an alternative history that would start with What if? “Guessing what reality is” was once acknowledged by Malamud as his way of living his life; in the novel, however, it could also describe what Yakov does many times while in prison. However, one cannot speak of pure fantasy if a dream sequence interrupts the character’s moments of waking: whenever the ontological status of the fantasy scene becomes questionable, I discern the magical realist writing mode. Skibell pushes the limits of imaginative fiction even farther than Malamud did. The very first scene in A Blessing on the Moon is indicative of the narrator-character’s extreme trauma: nothing can probably be more traumatic than the experience of violent death. The narrative voice of the victim, Chaim Skibelski, is even more understated than that of Malamud’s narrator as it renders the scene of his execution not so much

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through realistic visual details as through the subjective, ambiguous sensation of someone being shot in the back of the head without any prior warning. Similar to the scenes of massacre in Rushdie and García Márquez, Skibell’s also lacks specific words denoting physical violence, such as bullets or blood, and relies more on the affective charge of the experience. Most fantasy elements in Skibell’s novel are symbolic of trauma: for example, when the same soldier who apparently shot Chaim in the beginning of the novel (we are not shown or told about any shooters at that point) sneaks up on him saying, “One step more, and I’ll kill you again” (98), the scene becomes an indication of the repetition compulsion that characterizes all acting out of trauma (by victims and perpetrators alike, however different their ethical status). Too horrible to have been rationalized when it occurred, the original event keeps returning with the same affective impact that it had the first time. While Malamud directed his satire against the religious superstitions and intolerance of Russian Orthodox Christians, Skibell portrays a Polish family’s complicity with the persecution of the town’s Jewish minority. The Serafinskis show no pangs of conscience while enjoying the home, furniture, and household items that used to belong to Chaim Skibelski only hours before his execution. During World War II, the attitudes of the Poles and other European nations toward the Nazis’ genocidal practices oftentimes ranged from indifference to passive acquiescence or even active participation in acts of repression and violence—which might constitute yet another argument against the barbaric character of any imaginative literature after Auschwitz (according to Theodor Adorno). Before dogmatically foreclosing any new avenues for fictive reconstructions of the Holocaust by contemporary or future, Jewish or non-Jewish writers, one should also consider the alternatives: forgetting, trivialization, or even flat denial of the unspeakable horrors of the Nazi genocide. * Probably no other shock chronotope has maintained more of its poignant actuality and horrendous impact on the human psyche than

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war. Paradoxically, however, neither of the two novels discussed in the last chapter, Günter Grass’s Tin Drum (1959) and Tim O’Brien’s Going after Cacciato (1978), can be said to be about war, but rather about an “unusual” state of mind induced by the war chronotope (perceived as “usual” by everyone affected, however). If Carpentier, Rhys, and Condé represented the shock chronotope of slavery in an apparent attempt to deal with vicarious traumatization caused by reading texts of historical violence (according to their own admissions); if García Márquez and Rushdie re-created the chronotope of colonialism and early postcolonialism after either witnessing political violence (García Márquez) or discovering the tumultuous past of a culture of origin (Rushdie); and if Malamud and Skibell fictionalized the chronotope of the Holocaust in order to bear witness to transgenerational trauma, Grass and O’Brien write the chronotope of war as an act of both re-covering and working through personal traumata, and of coping with simmering, but acutely painful, feelings of guilt. Surprisingly, critics such as Michelle Balaev have expressed their doubts about the theory of intergenerational trauma, which “limits the meaning of trauma in literature because it conflates the distinctions between personal loss actually experienced by an individual and a historical absence found in one’s ancestral lineage” (151). What Balaev and others seem to be missing is, first, the way screen memories work in covering up historical trauma; second, the legitimacy of bearing witness by proxy; and third, the synecdochic and metonymic character of literature, that is, its capability of creating universal meanings through limited plots and individual characters. The sheer fact that Grass and O’Brien have artistically re-created a shock chronotope based on personal experiences does not in the least make their narratives any more believable than the other novels that I discuss, written by non-participants in, or secondary witnesses of, a shock chronotope. While I duly acknowledge the importance of the biographical elements embedded or suggested in The Tin Drum and in Going after Cacciato, my point is that the apparent fictional-memoir forms, in spite of their implied tone of authenticity, do not necessarily invest the accounts with any more historical/documentary authority than purely

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fictional/imaginative forms would—an issue that I also briefly address in the Holocaust chapter. While Oskar Matzerath and Paul Berlin, as imperfect mirrors of their authors, remain unreliable narrators who desperately try to remodel their pasts and subconsciously re-cover their traumata, the authors, Grass and O’Brien, are both acting out and working through their own unresolved traumata and feelings of guilt. Their common message may be summed up in the question “what if?” What if there are several angles from which events may be viewed before they can be turned into facts and made part of a coherent narrative? What if things had happened differently? What if they can happen differently? Compelled to learn how to live with trauma in order to survive, both authors and main characters manage to prompt readers—as opposed to telling them by ostentatious moralizing—to ponder on valuable lessons about human violence and injustice, guilt, complacency, and most importantly, the impossibility of innocence. Standing by and passively contemplating horror can only amount to guilt by association. Similar to Rushdie’s blending of magic and reality, Grass’s style is imbued with maybe less varied but undoubtedly more obsessively recurring magical realist elements, such as the effects of the main character’s drumming and those of his screaming. The object after which the novel is entitled stands, on the one hand, for Oskar’s means of expressing his anger and of gathering knowledge, and on the other hand, for his way of recovering (i.e., ordering and understanding) memories. In Schmuh’s Onion Cellar, in one of the late chapters of the novel, Oskar picks up his drum and plays with his heart: “It was a three-year-old Oskar who picked up those drumsticks. I drummed my way back, I drummed up the world as a three-year-old sees it” (533), that is, a world in which people know guilt and can still cry. Oskar’s screaming, audibly or inaudibly, causes a number of magical effects, such as the unbuttoning of Auntie Kauer’s black silk dress (74), the scraping of his first schoolmistressMiss Spollenhauer’s glasses (83), the shattering of all the windows and doors of the Stadt Theater (105), of Christmas tree decorations (260), and more. Oskar’s universe is one in which one has to stop growing and stay a gnome in order to circumvent any sense of responsibility and

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duty, as well as any feeling of guilt that adults might readily burden one with. This utterly unreliable narrator’s sometimes playful and sometimes grotesquely exaggerated actions speak for the common man who feels caught up in the whirlwinds of history, but at the same time questions his passivity and his innocence. If Grass and his narrator experience times of war from a civilian’s perspective, O’Brien’s narrator finds himself smack in the middle of combat, of real life-and-death situations. Oscillating between feelings of guilt and illusions of innocence, O’Brien’s main character, Private First Class Paul Berlin, creates an alternate reality in which his guilt is supposed to be atoned for by desertion, and his sense of duty fulfilled by capturing a deserter named Cacciato. What Berlin ultimately finds out is that one cannot flee one’s obligations by escaping into dreams, and conversely, that dreams may constitute a reality consistent enough to replace the one that one wishes to leave behind. While sharing significant traits with his author, such as the experience of Vietnam, the guilt over participating in a war with whose purposes and methods he does not agree, or the need to prove himself in front of his father and his community, Paul Berlin is not Tim O’Brien. The novel, which critics have constantly dubbed as a war novel, much to its author’s dismay, makes intensive use of heteroglossia: a nameless third-person narrator goes in and out the main character’s mind, and sometimes it seems that Paul Berlin’s voice alternates with Tim O’Brien’s, the implied author’s. By creating Berlin, O’Brien attempts to work through his Vietnam trauma, while his main character consistently tries to dream his way out of it, or, in other words, to re-cover it. “He wasn’t dreaming, or imagining; just pretending,” the narrator tells us. Berlin’s dream starts at the critical moment in which he is supposed to start the squad’s ambush of Cacciato, the deserter whose courage everyone secretly admires, and whose recklessness everyone openly hates. The traumatic moment leaves a hole in Berlin’s memory (“What, in fact, had become of Cacciato?”) that he feels compelled to fill, so he rephrases the question more precisely, “what part was fact and what part was the extension of fact?” (O’Brien 27) If there is a

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type of event in the novel that hardly lends itself, if at all, to becoming fact, it is inarguably death. Death is a constant, casual presence throughout the narrative. The narrator catalogues the names of eight dead comrades in the first seven sentences in the opening paragraph, and the ominous understatement at the beginning of the novel, “It was a bad time,” will be repeated several times thereafter, whenever scenes of extreme violence are described. The matter-of-fact tone of the narrative, which accounts for a certain degree of psychic numbing on the narrator’s and on the main character’s parts, also suggests a sort of moral “vacuum” for lack of “conceptual supplies” (Doc Peret’s phrases). One cannot possibly have order in a vacuum, without any substance. However, in any war, death becomes its own purpose, and in O’Brien’s novel, Lieutenant Sidney Martin is fascinated by it. What appeals to him is “the chance to confront death many times”; he believes in war as “a means of confronting ending itself, many repeated endings” (166). And yet, his ending can never be mentioned because it can be neither real nor imaginable; fratricide is too horrendous an act to understand and to remember. In the moral fog of war, good and evil are difficult to tell apart, and O’Brien does not take sides in the conundrum exactly because of the lack of order, purpose, and meaning in his narrator’s memories. * Writing horror is more than a gratuitous experiment in literary form: it combines creativity and political activism, as well as a genuine moral engagement founded on empathy, responsibility, and ultimately the courage to face what reason has refused to capture in an ordered stream of signification, and what official public discourse has marginalized as an “inappropriate” topic. While vicarious traumatization is usually what prompts a trauma narrative, the act of storytelling itself, by ordering facts into a coherent history, becomes an act of witnessing. Kaplan associates the term “witnessing” with “prompting an ethical response that will perhaps transform the way someone views the world, or thinks about justice.” In the theorist’s view, “witnessing leads to a broader

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understanding of the meaning of what has been done to victims, of the politics of trauma being possible” (123). I believe that the link between trauma and the writing that recovers it is established through the traumatic imagination, a compulsive call for storytelling, an inner urge of the authors’ psyche to restore, through their narrators and characters, voices that histories of horror and eventual post-traumatic cultures have reduced to silence. The fantastic, as an essential component of magical realism, comes to bridge the caesura in the transmission of violent realities. Magical realism writes the silence that trauma keeps reverting to, and converts it into history. ***

CHAPTER 1

LIVING WITH TRAUMA THE UNCANNY REALITY OF SHOCK CHRONOTOPES Long before it came to be described as a complex psychological condition in the late nineteenth century, trauma had been a recurrent marker of the human collective psyche along its turbulent journey through history. Originating in extreme events whose full meaning society could not possibly have grasped when they happened because their violence and non-conformity to its established sense of the real eluded understanding, trauma has afflicted individual identities and has left enduring scars on entire cultures. Those directly affected by it have either subconsciously acted it out, or have consciously tried to work through it, or have eventually found themselves crushed by it; psychiatrists have tried their best to counter its disruptive, and often destructive, effects; psychologists and sociologists have analyzed its causes, forms of manifestation, and impact on human subjectivity and sense of identity; politicians have taken advantage of its social implications; and artists have dug deep into their emotional and imaginative resources to represent it. Whichever the case,

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one must acknowledge an incontestable fact: to one extent or another and depending on one’s status—of victim, witness, or perpetrator— everyone touched by trauma has also had to live with it as one would with an integral part of one’s existence, albeit one with disintegrating effects. Trauma has constantly compelled those directly or indirectly affected by it to rethink their identities and to reshape their lives, to write and rewrite their histories. Ultimately, it has enabled humanity to look at a future that, in the absence of an understanding and coming to terms with its past, would remain disconcertingly empty and meaningless. Human history in general and its last two centuries in particular have seen atrocities resulting in mass injury and death of such magnitude that they defy not only understanding but also imagination. I will henceforth refer to all geo-historical frameworks characterized by extreme events as “shock chronotopes.”1 Shock chronotopes need to be understood as time-spaces marked by events whose violence has rendered them resistant to rationalization and adequate representation. Events that happened to one may thus continue to seem unfamiliar because, at the time of their occurrence, the subject lacked any conceptual tools adequate for their assimilation. However, they could also look familiar, as one consistently revisits them and tries to live them, for the first time, as delayed experiences. Therefore, I posit that the uncanny reality of shock chronotopes is responsible for triggering similarly uncanny traumatic responses. By relating unstable time-spaces to both the production and the representation of trauma, I establish a homology between traumatic experiences, the traumatic imagination, and the magical realist mode of writing. The nexus between trauma and its means of representation in literary imagery in general, and in magical realist fiction in particular, is determined by psychological, socio-cultural, historical, and literary factors. The evolution of the concept of trauma reflects the progress of scientific knowledge regarding the sources of trauma, its manifestations, and its impact on a subject’s identity. The relation between an unstable timespace—a shock chronotope—and its corresponding artistic chronotope brings into question the kind of language that one is supposed to use when speaking about trauma without hurting the victims’ memories or

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even injuring oneself. Testimonial language continually struggles to recapture reality in a culture in which signifiers have come to signify other signifiers, and the signifieds have all but disappeared. The connections between traumatic memory and narrative memory, on the one hand, and between traumatic memory and imagination, on the other, demonstrate the viability of the concept of traumatic imagination as a methodological tool to be applied in the analysis of magical realist writing and its postmodernist context. * Derived from the Greek traumatizo, meaning “to wound,” trauma originally referred to a shock to the body. In its first medical usage, the term denoted what we now call whiplash injury—or what the nineteenth century called “railway spine.” “Railway spine” was used to describe severe back pain usually incurred in the wake of train accidents, without any apparent physical injury to the back. The transfer of the concept of trauma from the physical to the psychological had occurred by 1885 “when a French medical thesis on trauma could routinely have a chapter on traumatisme morale. That was the year that Freud came to Paris to study under Charcot” (Leydesdorff et al.). The study of trauma first gained momentum after the wars of the nineteenth century—the Crimean War (1854–1856) and the American Civil War (1861–1865)— when soldiers who had experienced combat started displaying a variety of mental disturbances. The term neurasthenia came into circulation to describe individuals “suffering from phobias, nightmares and nervousness, arguably a male equivalent of ‘hysteria’ ” (Leydesdorff et al. 3). In the aftermath of World War I, a new term, “shell shock,” came into use and raised quite a few controversies in the medical arena. In World War II, trauma research conducted by the military reached across the Atlantic, and studies in the U.S. started focusing on so-called “combat fatigue.” Finally, the modern term in general circulation today, and not limited to soldiers’ experiences anymore—“post-traumatic stress disorder” or PTSD—became part of the medical jargon in the post-Vietnam years. Although the psychological condition first caught the attention of

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the medical community particularly when induced by extremely violent events, involving severe injuries to the human body, the ways of describing, analyzing, and therapeutically engaging its symptoms have undergone several changes over the past century. In his 1920 work Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud reassessed the importance he had assigned to the libido in his previous writings, and argued—with his trademark philosophical panache—for the powerful role of a death drive in the functioning of human consciousness and of all living organisms in general. If dreams were just symbolic wish fulfillments, as stated in his earlier works, how does one explain nightmares, let alone recurring nightmares? The answer, briefly formulated, is that the life of an organism does not seem to be determined so much by the reception of stimuli, after all, as it is by the protection against them. (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle 30). Consequently, the organism sets up a defense system meant to block outside “intruders” that threaten to induce feelings of unpleasure. But what happens if a stimulus comes from within? In the case of “internal excitations which produce too great an increase of unpleasure, there is a tendency to treat them as though they were acting, not from the inside, but from the outside, so that it may be possible to bring the shield against stimuli into operation as a means of defence against them” (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle 33). Dealing with internal stimuli as if they were external in order to activate the protective shield lies at the origin of projection, a syndrome characterizing many pathological processes. In reference to excitations that do break through the shield, Freud uses the qualifier “traumatic”: We describe as “traumatic” any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield. It seems to me that the concept of trauma necessarily implies a connection of this kind with a breach in an otherwise efficacious barrier against stimuli. Such an event as an external trauma is bound to provoke a disturbance on a large scale in the functioning of the organism’s energy and to set in motion every possible defensive measure. (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 33)

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By “disturbance on a large scale,” Freud seems to be hinting at the inception of an “internal” trauma, that is, a virtual re-creation of the “external” trauma that could not be blocked by the barrier of consciousness. One “possible defensive measure” could thus consist in a simulated, and sometimes obscurely symbolized, repetition of the breakthrough, probably in an attempt 1) to reenact, post facto, a situation in which the organism was caught unprepared, with its defenses down, and 2) to remedy that failure—to make sure that, next time around, it will be ready.2 Jean-Martin Charcot, Freud’s mentor at the Salpêtrière, had already used the term “traumatic hysteria,” which the Berlin doctor Hermann Oppenheim later renamed “traumatic neurosis,” “keeping the idea of ‘psychic shock’ but expanding the range of symptoms…” (Farrell 9). It is at this juncture that the concept acquires a clear definition, which will henceforth include the idea of a compulsion to repeat, symbolically, an event whose experiencing was missed at the moment of its occurrence. In this rather early formulation already, the original meaning of “wound” is replaced by that of “state of being wounded,” an acceptation that, in its turn, will later develop into “a series of symptoms,” acquiring a much more complex semantic load. In its latter meaning, the concept of trauma includes both the physical and the behavioral signs of the condition of “being wounded” as well as the specific responses triggered by that condition—which ultimately make it recognizable as a psychological disorder. It was only in the 1980s that the American Psychiatric Association officially acknowledged the psychological condition prevalent in veterans of the Vietnam War by calling it post-traumatic stress disorder. According to the APA, PTSD is made up of a series of symptoms that follow a psychologically distressing event “generally outside the range of usual human experience.” The symptoms usually manifest as “a preoccupation with the traumatic event in the form of nightmares, flashbacks, or persistent thoughts about the trauma that intrude into everyday affairs; and a general dysphoria, a numbness that takes the meaning out of life and makes it hard to relate to other people” (Tal 135). In certain cases, the symptoms may paradoxically involve a “state of ‘high arousal’

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or hyper-alertness to certain stimuli, particularly those which evoke reminders of the original trauma” (Leydesdorff et al. 5). These recurring evocations of the original event, which echo Freud’s description of the compulsion to repeat activities of repressed impulses (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 21), gained currency in the writings of Cathy Caruth, Dori Laub, Shoshana Felman, and others in the late 1990s. Caruth, for example, offers a general definition of trauma as “the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena” (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience 91). Years may pass until trauma victims first attempt to turn the violent event into an assimilable experience; their attempts may, of course, go on forever because timelessness is another attribute of trauma.3 In the introduction to her 1995 collection of essays Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Caruth remarks that the pathology of PTSD resides exclusively in the reception of the traumatic event, which, unassimilated when it occurred, comes to possess the experiencing subject through repetition. “To be traumatized,” she concludes, “is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (Trauma 4–5). Caruth seems to be on to something more here than the superficial idea of “image” as the faithful mirroring of an event. Since the 1980s, sociologists like Jean Baudrillard have been describing late twentieth-century society as a world of simulacra, where one is bombarded not so much with images or events anymore as with “image-events,”4 that is, events one can experience exclusively through the mediation of images. There are no real events anymore, Baudrillard contends, just images of other images—hence the recent extrapolations of the term “trauma.” Trauma has come to describe “the experience of both victims—those who have suffered directly—and those who suffer with them, or through them, or for them, if only by reading about trauma” (Miller and Tougaw 2), or watching, almost on a daily basis, images thereof. Even if the beginnings of the concept of “trauma” rely almost entirely on the presence of a violent physical injury or that of a near-death experience, history has meanwhile offered us incontestable proof that a sustained

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state of anxiety and/or fear may also produce symptoms of trauma. Kai Erikson, who held lectures before Romanian audiences just a few years after the fall of the Ceausescu regime, had the opportunity to witness firsthand the symptoms of a collective trauma when trying to have people talk about their lives under Communism. His way of approaching trauma, based on the analysis of its sources, does not deviate from Freud’s but adds, rather, a relevant aspect to it: “In order to serve as a generally useful concept, ‘trauma’ has to be understood as resulting from a constellation of life experiences as well as from a discrete happening, from a persisting condition as well as from an acute event” (Erikson 185). The structure of the traumatic experience, however, has to do less with its sources than with the dynamics governing its forgetting, remembering, and repeating: it is therein that the historicity of trauma reveals itself. “The historical power of the trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all” (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience 17). This apparent paradox was not lost on Freud either. In his essay “Recollection, Repetition and Working Through,” he remarked that certain trauma patients remembered something that could never have been forgotten because at the time it went completely unnoticed. His conclusion was that “it seems to make no difference whatever whether [something] was conscious and then was forgotten or whether it never reached consciousness at all” (Freud, “Recollection, Repetition and Working Through” 368). This latency, which Caruth assigns not to the process of forgetting per se but to the experience of trauma, reveals itself, becomes visible, in the subject’s actions. Freud also noticed that “[the patient] reproduces [the forgotten and repressed] not in his memory but in his behaviour; he repeats it, without of course knowing that he is repeating it” (Freud, “Recollection, Repetition and Working Through” 369). The observation is important because it confirms that trauma comes about outside of the human consciousness: it escapes knowing at every step of the way, whether it is remembering, repeating, or working through. Because trauma is positioned outside the realm of reason, it would seem that any attempt to detect its existence would be doomed to failure.

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Although this might be generally the case with traumatized subjects, the ways in which they act out trauma may still become visible to the outside observer or secondary witness (family member, psychoanalyst, social interviewer, historian, reader, etc.). The most common of these manifestations is repetitive behavior, which, as it happens without the subject’s knowledge or intention, Freud called “repetition compulsion.” In his later writings, Freud realized that the compulsion to repeat does not reactualize only experiences of pleasure, as he would have expected according to his earlier theory based on the pleasure principle, but also events that have caused the ego unpleasure and have therefore been repressed.5 This became the line of thinking that would lead to his discussion of traumatic neuroses. The idea of trauma as repeated suffering has since then been elaborated on by theorists such as Cathy Caruth, Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart (in collaboration), as well as by the Lacanian Linda Belau, among others. Traumatic memories, these diamonds in the rough of memory that are responsible for the compulsion to repeat, are substitutes for that which cannot be represented. Translated into Lacanian terms by Belau, the compulsion to repeat “bears the real; that something beyond-the-signified which, in the scope of the drives, is a repressed, forgotten correlate of being rather than a knowable object of representation” (Belau xxi). At the same time, however, the repressed real becomes visible under different forms—traumatic symptoms, acting out, and so forth—in the symbolic. Writing, in trauma literature and in magical realist fiction, may be both an unconscious way of acting out trauma as well as a conscious struggle to work through it. * By bearing the real, “that something beyond-the-signified” (Belau), the compulsion to repeat also perpetuates the foreclosure of any possibility for knowledge or representation. As such a crisis of the referent (primarily due to its inaccessibility) may not be sustainable, or “bearable,” ad infinitum without irrevocably eroding the most intimate fabric of the psyche, an understanding of trauma can lead to a reappropriation

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of history by reevaluating its (lost) referentiality. “Through the notion of trauma,” argues Caruth, “we can understand that a rethinking of reference is aimed not at eliminating history but at resituating it in our understanding, that is, at precisely permitting history to rise where immediate understanding may not” (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience 11). Rethinking reference and rewriting history should by no means be viewed as a distortion of facts but rather as a healing process of turning unassimilated events into facts. Therapy, in this case, amounts to much more than a simply medical corrective: it is a delayed restoration of a referent that escaped the subject’s perception at the time of its occurrence. If trauma—and specifically the kind resulting from loss—has historical foundations, it is also true that a history of trauma will most likely be accessible only through trauma, as if it were experienced for the first time. “For history to be a history of trauma means that it is referential precisely to the extent that it is not fully perceived as it occurs,” explains Caruth, “or to put it somewhat differently, that a history can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence” (Unclaimed Experience 18). The symptoms of traumatic experience do not contain any element of falsehood but actually constitute a pathology of history itself. The constant return of the extreme occurrence remains always true to the original event. Nevertheless, it is not only close encounters with death that may result in trauma but also the fact of having survived without knowing it: survival thus becomes just as incomprehensible as the experience of imminent death.6 Caruth is not alone in suggesting an understanding of history within an epistemology of trauma. In Post-traumatic Culture (1998), Kirby Farrell asserts that “As an interpretation of the past, trauma is a kind of history. Like other histories, it attempts to square the present with its origins. […] Because not everybody in a given culture is likely to be neurologically afflicted, or affected the same way, trauma is always to some extent a trope” (Farrell 14). Farrell reveals the core meaning of the concept of trauma, expanding its epistemological function (interpretation of the past) to a representational one (trope). In relating trauma to history, on the one hand, and to modern culture, on the other, his study makes a

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challenging point: considering that there has not been a single period in human history completely devoid of suffering or the threat of death, all history has been in all likelihood, and continues to be, traumatic. Trauma can help to understand cultural behavior in general, especially if one takes into account the collective nature of historical experiences.7 In establishing his argument, Farrell lays out four characteristics of PTSD that he believes make it adequate for an analysis of culture. The first is that “an injury can continue to influence behavior long after the initial impact,” so that a certain behavior does not necessarily have to be “a direct reaction to a massive injury, but may represent the cumulative effect of a number of small but synergistic shocks” (Farrell 11). The second quality is the frequency of dissociation in PTSD, which results in “uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell called ‘doublethink.’ […] Traumatic dissociation represents a loss of control, panic in the face of what is unthinkable” (Farrell 11). The third characteristic is contagiousness, “the ‘vicarious traumatization’ that may usually afflict therapists when working with victims” (Farrell 12). And the fourth trait of post-traumatic experience is “the way in which it destabilizes the ground of conventional reality and arouses death anxiety. […] Cultural integrity and death anxiety are closely and reciprocally related” (Farrell 12). Moreover, besides the patient/therapist relationship, the phenomenon of vicarious traumatization also involves the larger and more subtle process of intergenerational transmission as well as the ethical implications of empathy (secondary witnesses’ identification with the victims/survivors). The disruptive effects of death anxiety on cultural integrity account, historically, for the calculated politicization and ideological manipulation of trauma. The latency inherent to trauma becomes visible not only in the behavior and actions of the traumatized, but also in that of their families and other listeners—even when the latter are temporally removed from them. “A phenomenon of delayed response, trauma often unfolds intergenerationally; its aftermath lives on in the family—but no less pervasively in the culture at large. The story can deeply affect those who have not stood directly in the path of historical trauma, who do not share bloodlines

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with its victims” (Miller and Tougaw 9). Doubled by transmissibility, or contagiousness, the latency of trauma comes to confirm the rather widespread assumption that trauma has generally—and theoretically, at least—no end. There is no miracle cure or antidote that could erase it completely and irrevocably: there are only ways of learning how to cope with it, how to counteract its disruptive effects, and ultimately, how to live with it.8 Although there are no clear rules that would delimit and govern one’s responses to another’s trauma, and implicitly, one’s own vicarious traumatization, there is a morally reprehensible dimension to the total identification with the victims and the appropriation of their suffering—hence Dominick LaCapra’s coinage of the term “empathic unsettlement”: “Being responsive to the traumatic experience of others, notably of victims, implies not the appropriation of their experience but what I would call empathic unsettlement, which should have stylistic effects or, more broadly, effects in writing which cannot be reduced to formulas or rules of method” (LaCapra 41). Empathic unsettlement is a vicarious type of experience involving both the recognition of difference and the keeping of distance from the victim’s position;9 moreover, it may also constitute a way of addressing traumatic events and of “composing narratives that neither confuse one’s own voice or position with the victim’s nor seek facile uplift, harmonization, or closure but allow the unsettlement that they address to affect the narrative’s own movement in terms of both acting out and working through” (LaCapra 78). My concept of “traumatic imagination” comes quite close to the witness response proposed by LaCapra. As the traumatic imagination may result from both direct and vicarious traumatization, the narratives it engenders—which may themselves be manifestations of the processes of either acting out or working through trauma, or sometimes both—will be symbolized representations of trauma as well as new conduits for further traumatization. In its latter form of manifestation (originating in vicarious traumatization), the traumatic imagination necessarily needs to be founded on empathic unsettlement lest the voices of the victims be silenced or distorted beyond recognition.

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Whether they are founded on empathic unsettlement or they induce it, trauma narratives are often powerful enough to engage readers, as secondary witnesses, and to elicit responses to traumatic events to the point that the readers come to discover signs of their own personal traumata. A literature of trauma may thus play an important role in subject identifications and in creating an openness and a disposition to listen to the voice of the other.10 Amidst so many histories of unspeakable violence, understanding trauma could well establish that much-desired link between cultures, not merely by acknowledging the past of the Other, but more importantly, by clearing up one’s own. It is the same process of distancing—only this time from oneself—and of creating, thus, a unique perspective on one’s identity in relation to the Other. “In a catastrophic age,” remarks Caruth, “trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures: not as a simple understanding of the pasts of other but rather, within the traumas of contemporary history, as our ability to listen through the departures we have all taken from ourselves” (Caruth, “Introduction” 11). However, as human knowledge in general, interpretations of trauma may also entail negative consequences. As history has proven, trauma is capable of shattering reality—an entire culture’s generally accepted sense of normality—and of jeopardizing social cohesiveness and cultural integrity by exacerbating death anxiety. In the modern age, the politicization of trauma has become almost inevitable. “Whatever the physical distress, trauma is also psychocultural, because the injury entails interpretation of the injury,” writes Farrell. “[…] Because trauma can be ideologically manipulated, reinforced, and exploited—it calls for critical analysis as well as psychiatric intervention” (Farrell 7). Because psychiatric intervention relies, more often than not, on bearing witness to injury, witnessing can itself become a revolutionary act, a cry against any attempt to appropriate the experience of the traumatized. Kalí Tal describes bearing witness as an aggressive act, which “is born out of a refusal to bow to outside pressure to revise or to repress experience, a decision to embrace conflict rather than conformity, to endure a lifetime of anger

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and pain rather than to submit to the seductive pull of revision and repression. I am not using a trope when I say that trauma has grown on us. As if nature’s tremendous capacity to inflict deadly wounds (earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, epidemics, etc.) on our bodies and minds had not been enough to threaten our very existence on earth, we rose to the challenge and proved to ourselves that we could do it a lot better, faster, and more efficiently. And whenever we pretended to ignore our traumatic pasts—slavery, colonialism, wars, the Holocaust, and Communism, or downplayed their significance hoping that their memories would just go away, they did not; on the contrary, as recent events have shown, traumatic memories have kept coming back to haunt us with a vengeance. The anti-colonial movements in the 1950s and the following decades first brought home to the Western world the feeling of guilt for having inflicted trauma on a mass scale. For example, in the case of France, “the fight for openness about mass slaughter and torture during the Algerian war created a cultural space for talking about the effects of trauma, which appealed especially to those who doubted the moral supremacy of the West” (Leydesdorff et al. 10). The humiliation suffered by the United States in the nine-year-long Vietnam War was supposed to have been purged clean by the almost casualty-free First Gulf War in 1991. The video images of “smart” bombs hitting their targets with deadly but at the same time “clean” accuracy (no blood or mangled body parts) were meant to create the comforting feeling of a “just” war and to bring about, implicitly, some kind of tragic catharsis in the living-room audiences back home, thousands of miles away. Then followed the debacle of the humanitarian-military intervention in Somalia, the new millennium witnessed the horror of devastating attacks on the U.S. homeland for the first time in history, and then came the Second Gulf War in 2003. Just as violence proved to beget violence, trauma begot trauma. In other parts of the world, maybe less “interesting” for most of the living-room crowd trying to fight its daily boredom in front of the TV screen, traumatic histories followed a similar pattern of repetition. The Rwandan genocide was the Hutus’ way of redeeming their ethnic pride after decades

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of colonial oppression and Tutsi domination. The Balkan massacres and “ethnic cleansings” were the Serbs’ way of affirming their national identity, which they felt was threatened again by virtue of the traumatic memory of six centuries of Muslim rule. We seem to be constantly ready to fight death anxiety by inflicting it on the Other—and thus subconsciously perpetuating our own traumata. In Europe, a renewed interest in trauma and its social consequences became manifest in the late 1980s and early 1990s, following the abrupt— and in some places extremely violent—end of totalitarian Communist regimes. Confronting the trauma of the communist past was complicated in many places by the flare-up of dormant historical grudges and unsettled scores: a chaos of violence engulfed the Balkans in the early 1990s (Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and Albania); ethnic skirmishes erupted in some of the former Soviet republics (Georgia, Moldova, and the Baltic states); and ethnically and culturally diverse regions of the Russian Federation (Chechnya and Ingushetia) made a desperate push for independence. In such conditions, recognition of one’s victimhood becomes more than a personal matter: it acquires a pregnant social and political importance as well.11 One must fight not only an ideologically motivated institutional inertia but also, and more importantly, rekindled historical conflicts that seem to take precedence over any attempt at reconciliation and moving on. The distinction, of course, is purely theoretical; in reality, old historical power vectors are deliberately manipulated and turned into political strategies serving present interests. “What is occurring in all these [former communist] societies is an attempt to come to terms with a traumatic past that is collective in its impact and scale, the result of major historical forces and conflicts that have produced ruptures between the society’s past and its present. Often, this process of coming-to-terms has to confront institutional amnesia and official denial by the state itself, as forms of social and ideological control” (Leydesdorff et al. 11). Death anxiety induced by collective trauma may yet prove to be the most efficient political weapon of the modern era. Unfortunately, the way certain governments handle it rarely leads to its appeasement or healing: using the most advanced

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technologies of destruction in order to physically annihilate the other will only further inflict trauma on the survivors and witnesses on both sides of the front (metaphorically speaking, because in modern warfare there are no clear lines of demarcation between warriors anymore), and our cultural integrity–both “ours” and “theirs”—will be gradually eroded to its prehistorical condition where the stone, the stick, and the arrow were our only guarantees for survival. Living with trauma becomes possible by bearing witness to it, by testifying to the atrocities that caused suffering and/or death, or brought victims so close to them that their imprint changed their lives forever. Telling the story may not bring, ultimately, any kind of closure but integrate, rather, that which had resisted telling into the victims’ lives and into their community’s collective memory. Secondary witnesses must take survivors for who they are now, not look in them for who they used to be: then, and only then, can healing start. “Is it really possible to come to terms with catastrophic evil?” ponders Kirby Farrell. “We live by indirection, always compensating for what we finally cannot bear. Every culture invests in symbolic immortality. Immersed in the rules and rituals of cultural perpetuity, we compulsively tell stories that flatter our imaginative control” (Farrell 236). The compulsiveness of the traumatic imagination resides, evidently, in its traumatic origin: no matter how late, the story, or a story, must be told and, most importantly, make itself heard. In the case of limit events, most narrative memories would be precluded were it not for the traumatic imagination, simply because they would not be able to access the “facts” necessary to build narratives; the traumatic imagination is the psychological function of the creative mind capable, indeed, of converting unrepresentable events into accessible fictional image. Griselda Pollock defines the passage from trauma “as the move into the narrativity that institutes time, the pause in which memory forms, hence spatializes” or as “a passage into the temporality of narrative that encases but also mutes trauma’s perpetually haunting force by means of a structuration that is delivered by representation” (Pollock 40, my emphases). The time-space structure thus created by a narrative, or

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recovered through symbolic mediation from a yet unnamed (chaotic) referent, will become an artistic chronotope. * The relation between an unstable time-space, which I call “shock chronotope,” and its corresponding artistic, literary chronotope, as described by Mikhail Bakhtin, lies at the very core of the magical realist writing mode. Bakhtin’s definition of the artistic chronotope as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (Bakhtin 84) suggests the notion of “represented history” or “history in representation”: codes, signs, and rules that have turned bare events into a narrative. Representation becomes problematic when this very rendering of time “artistically visible” is faced with seemingly insurmountable hurdles like forgetting or, worse still, the impossibility of telling. When the violence of an event prevented its being grasped, rationalized, and stored in the subject’s consciousness at the moment of its occurrence, the time-space, or the shock chronotope, is so shaky that even making it artistically visible, that is, turning it into an artistic chronotope, requires an act of imagination, which I have qualified as traumatic. This type of artistic representation, which quite frequently makes use of magical realist imagery, should not be regarded as a denial of historical “fact” or as its distortion for the purpose of rendering it more palatable cognitively or emotionally, but rather, as an aesthetically and ethically adequate means of coping with a painful memory by telling—by bearing witness to it. In such a (con)text, the “represented” truth will not be of what happened but, rather, of what was only partially experienced as happening. Latency characterizes not only trauma but also the very structure of the experience itself. It then follows that the temporal element of any trauma narrative will need some kind of restoration, a reintegration in the artistic time-space continuum in order to be experienced, often for the first time, as a factual (be it still impossible) occurrence. Bakhtin also remarked that, “In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole.

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Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, and becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (Bakhtin 84). The concept of the chronotope, therefore, becomes crucial for a multi-angled understanding of the events narrated by both traumatized and non-traumatized authors.12 For Bakhtin, the chronotope is not only the “organizing center” for the narrative events of the novel, but also, and more importantly perhaps, the main locus of meaning (Bakhtin 250). The representational power of the chronotope provides concreteness to narrative events and restores time to its perceivable, experience-able condition.13 However, not only content is chronotopic: so is every literary image. The chronotopic character of every individual image accounts for the sometimes seemingly incidental presence of magical realist imagery in works usually not associated with this mode of writing. If every image has a chronotopic core—as do language and every word14—it follows that shock chronotopes, and implicitly their magical realist representations, may appear in a text even without defining its larger themes (slavery, postcolonialism, war, Holocaust literature, etc.) or style (memoirist, documentary, allegorical, fantastic, realist, magical realist, etc.). Given the chronotopic nature of narrative itself, any exploration of shock chronotopes will most likely lead to analyses of memory as a series of narrative acts, rather than to formalist distinctions between realism and fantasy.15 The relationship that Bakhtin establishes between actual chronotopes (as sources of representation) and the “reflected chronotopes of the world” (Bakhtin 253) is one of symbolic mediation16—the transfer between reality and the symbolic being effected by means of language. The linguistic medium, in a Bakhtinian sense, is not to be understood as a unified national language but, rather, as a speaker’s consciousness embodying certain experiences, idiosyncrasies of language, an individual worldview, as well as the codes of an entire cultural system. The artistic image of a language viewed in this manner will always be the product of a twofold consciousness: “The artistic image of a language must by its very nature be a linguistic hybrid (an intentional hybrid),” states Bakhtin. “It is obligatory for two linguistic consciousnesses to be

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present, the one being represented and the other doing the representing, with each belonging to a different system of language” (Bakhtin 359). In the context of trauma literature, the relationship between the two linguistic consciousnesses—one traumatized and the other vicariously traumatized—comes about by empathic unsettlement. Even if author and narrator are one person, as in the case of first-person trauma narratives (memoirist writing), there are still two linguistic consciousnesses at play in the creation of the artistic image. The voice recounting the traumatic event is not the same as the voice that has been silenced by it. As Antze and Lambek also remark, “There is a dialectical relationship between experience and narrative, between the narrating self and the narrated self. As humans, we draw on our experience to shape narratives about our lives, but equally, our identity and character are shaped by our narratives” (Antze and Lambek xviii). Our lives need, indeed, such occasional infusions of meaning through acts of narrative, as a gesture of reaffirmation of our shaky hold on them.17 However, when narratives are supposed to restore wounded identities, or the experiences meant to build narratives have been inaccessible (on account of the traumatic symptom of dissociation), finding an appropriate language to speak about trauma becomes problematic both semantically and ethically. * Any approach to representations of trauma needs to be founded on at least two premises: 1) a truthful representation necessarily presupposes re-creating the event (which was missed when it occurred); and 2) representation can never replace the experience itself. According to Kalí Tal, “Textual representations—literary, visual, oral—are mediated by language and do not have the impact of the traumatic experience. […] There is no substitute for experience—only being is believing” (Tal 15). Although representations cannot, indeed, have the same effect as the traumatic experience itself, they can still lead (and they most often do) to re-traumatization. Whatever the language used to represent trauma, it always operates with new meanings, derived from the traumatic experience and thus differs considerably from everyday usage.18

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While narrative is chronotopic, so is language, and so is every word, Bakhtin taught us. It then follows that the language used to represent shock chronotopes will operate on an altogether new semantic register. For example, the word “solution” will suggest one thing in a scienceresearch chronotope and something completely different (and emotionally surcharged) in the Holocaust chronotope. It has also been said that literature can at best describe traumatic events, as opposed to re-creating them. Tal, for instance, writes that “the horrific events that have reshaped the [traumatized] author’s construction of reality can only be described in literature, not re-created,” a statement with which I agree. However, saying that “only the experience of trauma has the traumatizing effect” (Tal 121) amounts to ignoring the reality of the phenomenon of vicarious traumatization. Certainly, second-hand trauma should never be automatically linked to the original event, but its occurrence nevertheless remains incontestable. The violent event and its literary representation are always two distinct realities, just as the trauma victim and the reader (secondary witness) are always two different identities. “The chasm between those who have experienced trauma, who have been ‘disturbed,’ and those who have not is vast” (Tal 134). The sheer variety of narrative forms (memoir, slave narrative, war novel, postmodern fantasy, traumatic realism, magical realism, etc.) that attempt to represent/describe traumatic events to those willing to listen accounts for the acute “hunger for explanation or formulation” that overcomes and often tortures trauma victims.19 As far as the nature of representation is concerned, trauma may also bring about what Dominick LaCapra calls “a dissociation of affect and representation: one disorientingly feels what one cannot represent; one numbingly represents what one cannot feel” (LaCapra 42). And yet, how is it still possible to turn an event into a narrative construct without diminishing its truthfulness and the survivor-narrator’s credibility? An appropriate mode of writing to accomplish this task would have to be, paradoxically enough, one that follows most remotely the traditional rules of mimesis or photographic realism. The magic in magical realism, for instance, confers on images an aura of irreality20 that may

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actually come the closest to the elusiveness of an actual shock chronotope. Magical realist imagery re-creates the inaccessible reality of the shock chronotope in a more graspable perspective, without breaking the trauma-induced silence by any explanations or interpretations. Its own intrinsic symbolism notwithstanding, magic has little in common with the playful randomness of dream imagery. LaCapra also notes this departure of art from everyday reality: At times, art departs from ordinary reality to produce surrealistic situations or radically playful openings that seem to be sublimely irrelevant to ordinary reality but may uncannily provide indirect commentary or insight into that reality. […] One might even speak of the emergence of a traumatic realism that differs from stereotypical conceptions of mimesis and enables instead an often disconcerting exploration of disorientation, its symptomatic dimensions, and possible ways of responding to them. (LaCapra 185–186)

The traumatic realism mentioned by LaCapra is a mode of writing that Michael Rothberg discusses at length in his study of representations of genocide, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Analyzing texts by Ruth Klüger and Charlotte Delbo, Rothberg remarks that “traumatic realism mediates between the realist and antirealist positions in Holocaust studies and marks the necessity of considering how the ordinary and extraordinary aspects of genocide intersect and coexist” (Rothberg 9). I believe that magical realist writing is similarly capable of representing the coexistence of the ordinary and the extraordinary in other shock chronotopes (like slavery, colonialism, and Communism) as well. Its seemingly impossible intrinsic dichotomy is in itself suggestive of a modus operandi straddling two realities: the actual shock chronotope and its narrativized counterpart. Semantically close to Rothberg’s concept of “traumatic realism,” LaCapra’s “traumatic or post-traumatic writing” involves “processes of acting out, working over, and to some extent working through in analyzing and ‘giving voice’ to the past—processes of coming to terms with traumatic ‘experiences,’ limit events, and their symptomatic effects that

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achieve articulation in different combinations and hybridized forms” (LaCapra 186). The traumatized victim may, for an undetermined length of time, retain the latent wish to come to terms with an extreme event, a wish that can underlie the more general need to give voice to the past; the question that usually arises is how. According to Thomas Elsaesser, “trauma’s non-representability is both subjective (trauma makes failure of memory significant) and objective (trauma makes of representation a significant failure), confirming that traumatic events for contemporary culture turn around the question of how to represent the unrepresentable…” (195). In my view, the unrepresentable need not necessarily be structured and rationalized in order to build a narrative; unlike traumatic writing or traumatic realism, magical realist images can just as well simulate, re-create, or re-present the feeling of the ineffable in order to bear witness to the “nonexperience” of a traumatic event. Writing trauma in general, regardless of the form or mode in which it is done, may be regarded both as a process of acting out trauma and as a deliberate attempt at working through it. Traumatized (or vicariously traumatized) authors compulsively and constantly strive to find a voice (more often than not a proxy, such as a narrator and/or a character) capable of expressing what is too terrifying to express, that horrible event which resists witnessing. Rarely, if ever, do the narrating self and the narrated self ever speak the same language, if only because the narrated self had no voice to speak with in the first place. What narrative theory calls the free indirect style can seemingly best convey the hesitant middle voice of trauma discourse. Using a familiarly Bakhtinian language, LaCapra describes free indirect style as “a hybridized, internally dialogized form that may involve undecidability of voice. […] Undecidability takes the free indirect style to its limit in a kind of discursive return of the repressed middle voice” (LaCapra 196–197). In other words, a third-person narrator chooses to mask his own voice by assuming the linguistic idiosyncrasies of one or several of his characters—thus performing, in some way, a ventriloquist’s trick. The puppet is thus given a voice that it does not own—a voice that the ventriloquist has created for it. In the final

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analysis, the language we hear belongs to neither the puppet nor the ventriloquist. It may be argued, of course, that in the case of trauma narratives, the roles are actually reversed: it is the third-person narrator that lacks a voice, so he makes one up and attributes it to his character. All of the aforementioned holds true for both traumatized and vicariously traumatized narrators.21 If the latter be the case, the narrators will need to be empathically unsettled and never identify themselves with the trauma victims. According to LaCapra, “The middle voice may be argued to be most suitable for representing or writing trauma, especially in cases in which the narrator is empathically unsettled and able to judge or even predicate only in a hesitant, tentative fashion” (LaCapra 197). Writing trauma means bearing witness to limit events, finding one’s voice and making it heard, and ultimately reappropriating one’s history and identity. Dori Laub equates the impossibility of witnessing with the total annihilation of one’s history and, implicitly, identity: “This loss of the capacity to be a witness to oneself and thus to witness from the inside is perhaps the true meaning of annihilation, for when one’s history is abolished, one’s identity ceases to exist” (Laub, “Truth and Testimony” 67). And yet, provided there is an audience willing to listen, there always lurks the danger of the treacherous word that may easily distort the truth of the account, in the otherwise bona fide attempt to rationalize the event and make it understandable. * The question of whether testimonial language is capable of recapturing the reality of a missed experience is complicated even further by a society and culture made up of preponderantly visual images, in which narratives have been replaced by information. The testimonial act is never a simple, factual statement but a practice by which language, instead of framing a conclusive system of knowledge, turns into a sociohistorical act. According to Shoshana Felman, “In the testimony, language is in process and in trial, it does not possess itself as a conclusion, as the constatation of a verdict or the self-transparency of knowledge. Testimony is, in other words, a discursive practice, as opposed to a pure

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theory” (Felman 16–17). An extrovert speech act meant to break the victims’ silence, testimonial language creates its own truth and opens up the virtual listener to the recognition of the other’s voice. “[W]hat makes trauma different from more traditional issues of representation […] is the idea that trauma also suspends the categories of true and false, being in some sense performative” (Elsaesser 199). Many times, survivors’ and first-hand witnesses’ accounts do not accurately match existing historical evidence—a fact that cannot, should not, discredit either the authenticity of the accounts or the authority of the survivors’ voices. Testimonial language seems to resist turning events into factual knowledge simply because they have never fully been lived: the events have eluded the victims’ cognitive capabilities and remained outside of all normal frames of reference. Felman remarks that “as a relation to events, testimony seems to be composed of bits and pieces of a memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have not settled into understanding or remembrance, acts that cannot be construed as knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition, events in excess of our frames of reference” (Felman 16). An experience that has not been fully lived remains just that: an excess of experience which trauma has deprived of any meaning and authenticity. The shocking nature of the chronotopes based on extremely violent events prevents any integration into a coherent history. Several years usually go by before victims/survivors can muster the strength to testify, willingly submitting themselves to the compulsion to tell their stories. Testimony restores their voices and that part of their identities which died with and because of the overwhelming events. Consequently, remembering and telling are attempts to bring back meaning and a feeling of authenticity into their present lives. “An experience that is not a lived event, and that does not engage the present of presence,” writes Maurice Blanchot, “is already nonexperience (although negation does not deprive it of the peril of that which comes to pass already past). It is just an excess of experience, and affirmative though it be, in this excess no experience occurs” (Blanchot 50–51). In other words, there can be no experience beyond what frames a “normal,” day-to-day reality—that is, one cannot experience the real; and yet, what

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one can manage to experience are different versions or interpretations of it. Viewed in this light, “trauma theory is not so much a theory of recovered memory as it is one of recovered referentiality”—and this can only be done through interpretation (Elsaesser 201). The meaning of the phrase “traumatic event” is not too different from what Blanchot calls “disaster,” the ultimate and at the same time impossible experience (Blanchot 28). It is disaster’s relation to forgetfulness, a “forgetfulness without memory,” which forecloses its accessibility by consciousness.22 To experience disaster would then amount to the oxymoronic but nevertheless suggestive “to remember forgetfully” (Blanchot 3). Blanchot’s rhetoric itself seems to simulate the semantic acrobatics that testimonial language is more often than not compelled to execute. When Blanchot writes, for instance, that “since the disaster always takes place after having taken place, there cannot possibly be any experience of it” (Blanchot 28), one may recognize the idea of latency inherent to the traumatic event. The event that brought about the traumatic response in the first place is experienced for the first time in the artistic chronotope, so it literally “takes place” after it has taken place. The elusive reality of the actual shock chronotope induces a state of paralysis (the psychic numbing characteristic of PTSD), an inability to recapture reality and reintegrate it into an acceptable and accessible normality.23 Testifying to shock chronotopes thus becomes an act of searching for reality through language and through one’s own woundedness. Regardless of the amount of historical evidence accounting for extreme events (official documents, film, artifacts, buildings, etc.), trauma requires witnessing through language in order to be fully known. However, testimony is not just a monologue: without an audience willing to listen, the trauma victim would only testify to himself. Through the testimonial narrative, the event comes to life and is experienced for the first time by both survivor and listener: “The listener, therefore, is a party to the creation of knowledge de novo,” writes Dori Laub. “The testimony to the trauma thus includes its hearer, who is, so to speak, the blank screen on which the event comes to be inscribed for the first time” (Laub, Testimony 57).

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Laub’s observation reveals the inherently dual nature of the testimonial act: not only does it recount the speaker’s experience, but it also traumatizes his listeners with each telling.24 Laub also argues that the listener may even become a “co-owner of the traumatic event: through his very listening, he comes to partially experience trauma in himself” (Laub, Testimony 57–58). The psychoanalyst must have the same kind of phenomenon in mind that LaCapra has called “empathic unsettlement”: no matter how disturbed or vicariously traumatized the listener may be, he needs to stay aware of the unbridgeable distance between him and the trauma victim (when the latter is the speaker), or the vicariously traumatized author (when a secondary witness is the speaker). In a testimony, any speaker has to choose an appropriate language, in the Bakhtinian sense of the word. “[The literary artistic] consciousness finds itself inevitably facing the necessity of having to choose a language,” emphasized Bakhtin. “With each literary-verbal performance, consciousness must actively orient itself amidst heteroglossia, it must move in and occupy a position for itself within it, it chooses, in other words, a ‘language’ ” (Bakhtin 295). In each literary instance, in any artistic chronotope, one and the same speaking consciousness navigates among different languages. Bakhtin describes heteroglossia as “another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way,” which comes noticeably close to the middle voice and the free indirect style. He then further elaborates: Such speech constitutes a special type of double-voiced discourse. It serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author. In such discourse there are two voices, two meanings and two expressions. And all the while these two voices are dialogically interrelated, they – as it were – know about each other […]; it is as if they actually hold a conversation with each other. (Bakhtin 324)

In trauma testimony, the narrating (dissociated) self and the narrated (traumatized) self function in the same way: their voices intersect

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and overlap in the course of the narrative in which the artistic shock chronotope comes to life. But whatever the language game at play in the trauma narrative, the act of telling often comes with a price. Odds are usually in favor for testimony to lead to a retraumatization of the speaker. The process may occur in at least two situations: 1) when bearing witness to the event brings about a re-living of its emotional impact, that is, of the original trauma (Paul Celan and Primo Levi are the first writers that come to mind); and 2) when testifying takes place either in the presence of a skeptical audience that is hardly willing to listen or in the absence of any listener. “If one talks about the trauma without being truly heard or truly listened to,” warns Laub, “the telling might itself be lived as a return of the trauma—as re-experiencing of the event itself” (Laub, Testimony 67). It then follows that empathic unsettlement (the appropriate response to trauma proposed by LaCapra) plays a decisive role in both the creation and the survival of the trauma narrative: its absence may either distort the story or destroy it altogether. In order to prevent the annihilation of the story, Laub proposes a therapeutic process based on building a narrative that would re-externalize the event and then repossess it again—this time around as a “real” reality. What Laub actually suggests is that healing cannot happen in solitude: on the receiving end of his proposed therapeutic process, there is always a listener or a reader who will internalize the trauma conveyed by the speaker’s narrative—and possibly pay his own price for it in the process. As generally happens with all literary experience, but particularly with trauma narratives, the listening self (the reader) is drawn into the language game (which, as Bakhtin tells us, is always chronotopic) and finds himself traumatized by vicariously re-living the narrated events. When words and images come to make the reader feel the pain of the traumatized consciousness (narrator or implied author), he will find himself in a position of response-ability and connectedness to the other.25 Witnessing excludes any passivity on the part of its subjects, both the traumatized and the vicariously traumatized: it is an act that reaffirms the subjectivity lost in the wake of the traumatic event. Moreover, as Kelly Oliver also remarks, “While trauma undermines subjectivity and witnessing restores

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it, the process of witnessing is not reduced to the testimony to trauma” (Oliver 7). Witnessing implies both seeing with one’s own eyes and testifying to something that cannot be seen: the former meaning usually derives from first-hand experience, while the latter presupposes an openness and willingness to testify “beyond recognition.”26 On a micro-social level, trauma may thus help establish an “encounter” with the other, just as on a macro-social one it brings cultures closer to each other. The act of witnessing is thus inextricably linked to the dynamics of representing shock chronotopes—of reincorporating the unrepresentable into reality—and of establishing a kind of “ethics of the never-again.” Witnessing is not so much about restoring an ethical dimension to a chronotope that has apparently slipped out of any moral control as it is about making certain that the “slippage” will never happen again. In a Lacanian context, reality belongs to the symbolic order; consequently, the traumatic narrative—situated at the articulation between memory and imagination—will always amount to a struggle to gain linguistic access to the real, the nonexperience, the excess of experience which could not be integrated into the subject’s normal frame of reference. This struggle is never limited only to a recovery of the real, but also aims to define the subject’s self-awareness of his or her identity. “It is in this sense that Lacan speaks of the après-coup as the act of the subject filling a void or a gap in his/her identity, by providing a causal-chronological sequence or a chain of signifiers, to assure him- or herself of a spatio-temporal consistency and a place in the symbolic order” (198). However, the victim’s memory may often find itself stalled by a “politics of memory” meant to prevent it from reaching the public domain.27 For a better understanding of testimonial language and magical realist imagery in the representation of shock chronotopes, that is, in writing trauma, it is necessary to contextualize a few concepts proposed by Jacques Lacan in the 1970s and revisited by theorists such as Slavoj Žižek, Hal Foster, and Jean Baudrillard in the last two decades of the last century. As early as the 1950s, Lacan differentiated between the Real, understood as the pre-symbolic reality, the Symbolic, the order which governs our perception of reality, and the Imaginary, which has no real

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existence and manifests itself only through structural effects. In the same period, in his first Seminar, Lacan defined the traumatic event as “an imaginary entity which had not yet been fully symbolized, given a place in the symbolic universe of the subject [Lacan, 1988, ch. XXII]” (Žižek 162). Twenty years later, trauma is not imaginary anymore but real—it is a hard core resisting symbolization. Žižek, who builds his argument in The Sublime Object of Ideology on Lacan, emphasizes that “it does not matter if [trauma] has had a place, if it has ‘really occurred’ in so-called reality; the point is simply that it produces a series of structural effects (displacements, repetitions, and so on). The Real is an entity which must be constructed afterwards so that we can account for the distortions of the symbolic structure” (Žižek 162). It is exclusively through its effects that we can perceive the Real and its impossibility—the “nonexperience” or the “disaster.” “If death is the real, and if the real is impossible,” Blanchot wrote in the early eighties, “then we are approaching the thought of the impossibility of death” (The Writing of Disaster 121). Shocking at first glance, Blanchot’s hyperbole wants to suggest the eternal return of trauma (of the real), that is, the reenactment of a death that never happened. Resisting symbolization and at the same time lacking any ontological consistency, the Real persistently returns as something missed—not unlike the traumatic event. Drawing on Lacan, Žižek defines the traumatic event as “a point of failure of symbolization, but at the same time never given in its positivity—it can be constructed only backwards, from its structural effects. […] The traumatic event is ultimately just a fantasy-construct filling out a certain void in a symbolic structure and, as such, the retroactive effect of this structure” (Žižek 169). In the final analysis, if we can understand the traumatic event as a fantasy-construct, that is, an impossibility, an emptiness anchored (artificially) in the symbolic structure (in reality), we will also realize the appropriateness of magical realist imagery and narratives to convey what photographic realism could not: the presence of an absence, of something graspable more as an effect than as an entity. The traumatic absence needs to be reconstructed bit by bit as a feeling, not as a graspable referent. “If trauma is experienced through its forgetting, its repeated

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forgetting,” remarks Elsaesser, “then, paradoxically, one of the signs of the presence of trauma is the absence of all signs of it”; and because “trauma potentially suspends the normal categories of story-telling, [it makes] it necessary that we revise our traditional accounts of narrative and narration” (199). Even if the Lacanian Real cannot be inscribed, we can still locate it as impossibility, as a traumatic place.28 And it certainly seems that in our times, locating the Real has metastasized into a cultural obsession—in theory, criticism, art, literature, and film. The ghosts of history—including their most horrific apparition, genocide—have been returning with a vengeance throughout the second half of the last century: from Pol Pot’s killing fields to Idi Amin Dada’s reign of terror, from the Rwandan massacres to the Balkans’ ethnic cleansing. Additionally, the threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold-War years has added new meanings to our historically entrenched death anxiety, bringing home its terrifying imminence and apparent inevitability. Trauma does not create subjectivity, as some theorists would want us to believe, but undermines it by eroding its most important reality ordering function—memory. Therefore, perhaps, “[i]n popular culture, trauma is treated as an event that guarantees the subject, and in this psychologistic register the subject, however disturbed, rushes back as witness, testifier, survivor” (Foster 168). The survivor can, indeed, (re) affirm himself as subject, but only if he is given a voice, a voice that can—must—also be heard.29 Testimonial language thus comes to fill a hole (the void of the Real) in the victim’s reality, yet not by restoring a missed signified—which still remains an impossibility—but by producing a new signifier, a construct capable of making the emptiness visible and of speaking the silence on behalf of those who cannot speak anymore. To remember forgetfully. * Memory has been described as a function of the human psyche far more complex and vital to its integrity than popular imagination would have it. For one thing, not only the conscious but all excitatory processes leave marks that ultimately build memory. Freud called these

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marks “memory-traces” while noticing their paradoxical nature: “Memory-traces have nothing to do with the fact of becoming conscious; indeed they are often most powerful and most enduring when the process which left them behind was one which never entered consciousness” (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle 27). The last sentence describes, in fact, traumatic memory. Psychoanalytical interest in memory goes back as far as the late nineteenth century, when Pierre Janet, a contemporary of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière and of William James in the United States, called attention to the fact that “actual memories may form the nucleus of psychopathology and continue to exert their influence on current experience by means of the process of dissociation” (van der Kolk and van der Hart 159), a process that had previously been ignored by psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Janet’s name and work have never reached Freud’s prominence,30 but his observations on memory have proved to be invaluable in modern psychology and trauma studies. To begin with, Janet differentiates between narrative memory and actual memory—the “automatic integration of new information without much conscious attention to what is happening.” According to his definition, “Narrative memory consists of mental constructs, which people use to make sense out of experience” (van der Kolk and van der Hart 160). Linking past and present, memory discovers, contours, and preserves identities by means of narratives. It is safe to say that human lives, in fact, are the stories that people either tell or hear. “Life itself is a creative construction, and there is a point at which a person’s life and the stories she tells about it begin to merge” (Antze and Lambek xvii). And yet, it would be wrong to assume that narrative memory equals just a construction of the past: the emphasis here lies on the “creative distillation and transformation of past experience,” which define all narrated memory (Lambek 244). Narrative memory does not store or construct facts about past experiences, but rather meaning, a congruous sense of what happened—which can then be integrated into previous life experiences. As Janet also noticed, “what memory processes best is not specific events, but the quality of experience and the feelings associated with it” (van der Kolk and van der Hart 169).

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It would be wrong to assume that the building of a narrative, however plausible, convincing, and truthful, can by itself have a liberating effect. Covering the road from symptoms to words still does not mean that the event has been deemed as “true,” cleared as acceptable, and integrated into the subject’s general system of references. Any individual narrative first needs corroboration by other narratives, or by the others’ willingness to listen by way of empathic unsettlement, in order to eventually find its place in a community’s memory. No particular narrative may have complete authority over other narratives. When it comes to trauma narratives in particular, the distinction between repetition and compulsive repetition becomes blurred. According to Petar Ramadanovic, “At stake here is the relation between history, memory, and literature, and equally, the natures of literature and trauma—that is, what they are—as well as the possibility for the constitution of an identity in the wake of a traumatic event” (Ramadanovic 181). The weakest link in this relation would be the memory of violent events, incompatible with existing systems of meaning. In Janet’s theory, such a memory will always be “stored differently and not be available for retrieval under ordinary conditions: it becomes dissociated from conscious awareness and voluntary control” (van der Kolk and van der Hart 160). It is relevant to notice that, almost half a century after Janet, Bakhtin wrote about a seemingly similar kind of dissociation: the one existing between the author and his own time-space (actual chronotope), on the one hand, and the represented subject and time-space (artistic chronotope), on the other. Although Bakhtin might not specifically refer to violent chronotopes, the idea of the speaker’s intrinsic state of remoteness and “dispossession” of the narrated events comes to confirm the unbridgeable gap between author and subject, between an actual and an artistic chronotope: If I relate (or write about) an event that has just happened to me, then I as the teller (or writer) of this event am already outside the time and space in which the event occurred. It is just as impossible to forge an identity between myself, my own ‘I,’ and that

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By analogy, one may infer that narrative memory (usually attributed to the author) can never be identical with traumatic memory (belonging to the subject of the narrated event) even in cases where the author and the survivor-subject of the story are one and the same entity. For one thing, narrative memory is a social act—that is, in the presence of an audience willing to listen, it may be integrated into a collective memory— while traumatic memory lacks any addressee except maybe the victim himself.31 In most cases, traumatic memory may even preclude the construction of a narrative, which means that the subject revises the part he has played in the event ad infinitum, looking for a perfect (though impossible) adaptation. Unlike ordinary memory, traumatic memory comes about by a mechanism that Janet calls “restitutio ad integrum,” that is, “when one element of a traumatic experience is evoked, all other elements follow automatically” (van der Kolk and van der Hart 163). By virtue of its dissociation from consciousness and voluntary control, traumatic memory usually takes on a life of its own, figuratively speaking, forcing the trauma victim to revisit the violent event as long as his or her control over it is unsatisfactory and until it (the traumatic memory) can be turned into narrative memory.32 * One could visualize memory as a palimpsest—successive inscriptions of reality and fantasy—where any given inscription may either dissimulate or reveal the other. “The past does not correspond to the real in any direct, unmediated way since what we remember are memories—screens always already impressed by the fantasies or distortions of a series of successive rememberings,” write Antze and Lambek (xii). Translated into Bakhtinian terms, memory could be viewed as

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an example of heteroglossia, a multitude of refracted speeches which consciousness is supposed to navigate and turn into a coherent language. The complex relationship between reality and fantasy in both representation and interpretation thus plays itself out within memory. Memory is also the locus of the fragile balance between fact and interpretation, or recollection and understanding (Antze and Lambek xxvii). Far from being an unmediated record of past events, memory is a construction, or sometimes re-construction of experiences in such a way that they fit already preexisting models. “When encouraged to flesh it [memory] out,” explains Laurence J. Kirmayer, “we readily engage in imaginative elaboration and confabulation and, once we have done this, the bare bones memory is lost forever within the animated story we have constructed” (Kirmayer 176). Narratives which re-construct traumatic memories will thus always rely on the subject’s (victim/ survivor’s) direct experience with pain as well as on the power of his imagination and on models of experience already in place. According to Kirmayer, trauma narratives are rhetorical forms meant to reconstitute the self shattered in the wake of violent events (191). Nowhere close to the representational methods of photographic realism, trauma narratives make use of imagination in order to bridge the gap between traumatic and narrative memory, or between an address without a recipient and a social act with an audience ready to listen. The crucial role played by imagination in the rendering of violent time-spaces, or shock chronotopes, must not be understood as an act of escapism, of seeking refuge in the realm of fantasy. Imagination in trauma narratives and in specific magical realist imagery constitutes the nexus between a traumatic memory and an artistic shock chronotope; therefore, I have proposed the term “traumatic imagination” in order to delimit its specific constructs (magical realist imagery based on extreme events) and to emphasize its important role in the re-affirmation of the traumatized (and vicariously traumatized) self. The concept has proved useful not only in approaching a variety of shock chronotopes (slavery, colonialism, war, the Holocaust, and Communism), but also in thinking about representations of trauma on a larger theoretical scale.

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Living with trauma does not, should not, mean resignation, selfobjectification, or submission to the state of woundedness. Living with trauma—with trauma as a response to shock chronotopes and with trauma as a cultural phenomenon of re-cognition of the other—means, should mean, engaging the past by telling its stories, re-presenting the void in reality, restoring the shattered subjectivity, as well as learning how to listen to the other and to oneself. The successive definitions of the concept of trauma show the progress in the discovery of its sources and manifestations. Identifying the historical origins of trauma has proved to be a significant step toward the reevaluation, interpretation, and rewriting of history itself, as a history of trauma. Understanding trauma in its historical context and history as trauma narrative amounts to more than an academic undertaking: it means coming to terms with our past, and it may literally mark the beginning of a newfound humanity—in us and in the other. Between the impact of a shock chronotope and its artistic representation unfolds the difficult process of symbolic mediation characteristic of most trauma narratives. In the context of representation, one must also keep in mind that the artistic image of the language of trauma is the product of a twofold consciousness, whose unhealable (but acknowledgeable) rift prompts both repetition (acting out) and repetition by telling. The traumatizing effect of the language used by the victim-speaker may often lead to the vicarious traumatization of the witness-listener or reader but not in the sense of identification with the former’s voice: the response to trauma should take place by empathic unsettlement, by feeling both the closeness of the survivor’s pain as well as its remoteness. Testimonial language comes to turn the unreality of the excess of experience (the nonexperience, the real, the disaster) into a graspable event and integrate it into the symbolic order. And even though restoring the missed signified may prove impossible, testimony produces a new signifier, a construct that can render the emptiness visible and make the silence heard. The traumatic imagination can ultimately transform traumatic memories (without an addressee) into narrative memories, the

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essential elements in an artistic shock chronotope. However, imagination should not be understood as a refuge into the diluted space of fantasy, but on the contrary, as a catalyst in capturing the acuteness of feeling and the painful quality of the traumatic experience. Magical realism copes with the absence of the real (and its resistance to symbolization) by trying to represent its structural symptoms. In a reality whose signifieds have all but disappeared, leaving behind only signifiers and signifiers of other signifiers, the ever-resourceful literary consciousness may yet have found another object and medium: hyperreality. ***

CHAPTER 2

WRITING THE VANISHING REAL HYPERREALITY AND MAGICAL REALISM

To view hyperreality as the object and medium of the traumatic imagination, that is, the artistic consciousness engaged in coping with and reconstructing the real, does not entail following an elusive chimera, as certain contemporary theorists tend to consider Jean Baudrillard’s term. Should anyone wish to look for chimeras, magical realist writing offers plenty of them. A chimera is likely to reveal itself only to those who can look beyond the realistic detail and grasp the intricate fabric that makes up the dual ontological structure of the magical realist text. By the same token, the hyperreal is neither an object nor a medium, but their conflation—the only reality of a world where the distinction between signified and signifier has all but disappeared. The modus operandi of the traumatic imagination in magical realist writing needs to be understood within the neighboring literary genres— fantasy, the fantastic, the marvelous, and the uncanny, as well as the postmodern context in which magical realism appeared and has developed since the 1930s. The need for illusion and magic has become a

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matter of survival in a civilization used to priding itself on scientific accomplishments, positivist thinking, and the metaphysical banishment of death. Fantastic re-presentation (imaginative reconstitution) has proven to work where realistic representation (descriptive mimesis) apparently failed. Postmodernist fiction in general and magical realist writing in particular re-present not reality but rather its non-referential substitutes or simulacra. By virtue of its subversive character, magical realism foregrounds, somewhat paradoxically, the falsehood of its fantastic imagery exactly in order to expose the falsehood—and traumatic absence—of the reality it has proposed to re-present. As Robert Scholes would say, “Fabulation lives.” * When Guy Debord first published The Society of Spectacle, questioning reality and its representations had already been on philosophers’ minds for about twenty-three centuries, since the days of Plato and Aristotle. In 1967, Debord remarked, on a politically ominous note, that representations of reality through images had gradually led to a dissimulation of reality—and implicitly, society’s alienation from it. Debord warned about the onset of a new model of social life, based solely on representation for the sake of disguise and manipulation, that is, on an intentionally deceptive spectacle: “[The spectacle] is not something added to the real world—not a decorative element, so to speak. On the contrary, it is the very heart of society’s real unreality. In all its specific manifestations—news or propaganda, advertising or the actual consumption of entertainment—the spectacle epitomizes the prevailing model of social life” (Debord 13). In his use of the term, Debord implies more than just a collection of images: the spectacle has not only penetrated the very fabric of social relationships, it now is a “social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (Debord 12). Spectacle is not to be understood as “show” or “entertainment” anymore, but as a way of organizing reality—and dangerously close to becoming our only way of coping with it—and ultimately, as the fundamental manner of perceiving ourselves in relation to it. Debord’s social analysis comes to

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underscore a general crisis in remembering the past as well as a distortion of our very perception of time: “The spectacle, being the reigning social organization of a paralyzed history, of a paralyzed memory, of an abandonment of any history founded in historical time, is in effect a false consciousness of time” (Debord 114). Images confine us to an eternal present, in which the past exists exclusively as a “packaged” text, the fabricated memory of an inexistent memory, and the future is reduced to an extension of the here and now: planned, outlined, predicted, prediagnosed, perfect, and eternal—purged of even the remotest idea of death, but at the same time, and because of it, lifeless. A little over a decade after Debord, Jacques Ellul critiqued the primacy of images33 in contemporary representations of the world, which, in his opinion, have led to the present “humiliation of the word.”34 Ellul also pointed to the paralyzing effect that the image has on our perception of objects: “The image is present. It is only a presence. It bears witness to something ‘already there’: the object I see was there before I opened my eyes. The image exists in the present and conveys to me only a present. […] The image conveys to me objects that do not change— truly unchanging objects” (Ellul 9). Such a perception not only empties objects of one of their most essential dimensions – time (Debord’s “paralyzed history”)—but also, through the same process, circumvents human thought. Meaning—and, by extension, the truth it is supposed to convey—is thus reduced exclusively to what one sees. Similar in tone to Debord’s, Ellul’s rhetoric is openly political: his underlying message is that, by marginalizing the word and its intrinsic thought-provoking capacity, images have turned into instruments of power. However, unlike Debord’s, Ellul’s discourse also bristles with sarcasm: “The word would only increase my anxiety and uncertainty. It would make me more conscious of my emptiness, my impotence, and the insignificance of my situation. With images, however, everything unpleasant is erased and my drab existence decorated by their charm and sparkle” (Ellul 128). The fact that Ellul dwells on this hallucinogenic character of images quite at length is particularly relevant to the understanding of more recent texts by Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Žižek, and Paul Virilio, among others, as well

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as to the interpretation of such hugely successful pop-culture phenomena as the Wachowski brothers’ film The Matrix. Although Ellul assigns to the image and the spectacle roughly the same meaning (false representation, disguise of reality) as Debord did, Ellul’s spectacle additionally signifies show, facile entertainment, a deliberate distraction from “real” reality: it efficiently finalizes the victory of sight over the word.35 What sight achieves turns out to be more than just a representation of reality: it ends up as an appropriation of reality by complete identification with it. The image, just like reality, cannot be questioned: it is the ultimate evidence of reality’s existence. The image is reality. “This happens,” Ellul explains, “because images become more real than reality itself. The representation comes to serve as our mental framework; we think we are reflecting on facts, but they are only representations. We think we are acting, when we only flounder around in a stew composed of representations of reality that come from a profusion of images, all of which are synthetic” (Ellul 115–116, emphasis added). The subject’s confusion, then, seems to be due to an overlap of two kinds of representation: the visual (the image perceived by sight) and the rational (the image constructed by the mind). The impression that the two are identical seals the ultimate triumph of the spectacle. Interestingly enough, Ellul’s trope—the “stew” of reality representations—finds an uncanny echo in the same year (1981) in Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation: “[T]here is not only an implosion of the message in the medium, there is, in the same movement, the implosion of the medium itself in the real, the implosion of the medium and of the real in a sort of hyperreal nebula, in which even the definition and distinct action of the medium can no longer be determined” (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation 82). Ellul’s “stew” and Baudrillard’s “nebula” emphasize the idea that images have moved beyond their distinctive status and original function as reproductions of reality to gradually become the only reality available to our perceptions. The medium is now not reality’s but its own messenger: a nebula of representations without a referent—a hyperreality. Writing at about the same time as Ellul, Baudrillard further expanded the critique of the spectacle. However, barely fourteen years after

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Debord, Baudrillard pointed to a society quite different from the society of the spectacle. “We are no longer in the society of the spectacle, of which the situationists spoke, nor in the specific kinds of alienation and repression that it implied,” he announces in Simulacra and Simulation (1981). The medium and the message have become indistinguishable from each other because, in the absence of an original referent, the medium has gradually turned into its own referent. There is nothing to be represented anymore, when everything has succumbed to the all-encompassing process of simulation: “[T]he era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials,” remarks Baudrillard. “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real”36 (Simulacra and Simulation 2). Before it becomes simulation, the image-reality relationship apparently follows four more or less distinct stages: in the first, the image still reflects reality; in the second, it disguises reality; in the third, it masks the absence of reality; and in the last, it loses all connection with reality and becomes its own simulacrum (6). In the process of simulation, the image loses its old functionality as a representation of reality to the new status of model: it is now models that generate a “real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (1). Baudrillard’s hyperbolic language—“liquidation of all referentials,” “the murder of the Real,” “the Perfect Crime,” and so forth—has somewhat foreseeably rendered his arguments vulnerable to doubt, critical attacks, or even derision. On closer scrutiny, however, there is in fact no question of a disappearance of the real, but, on the contrary, of an overproduction of reality. As Baudrillard himself explains, “It is the excess of reality that puts an end to reality, just as the excess of information puts an end to information, or the excess of communication puts an end to communication” (The Vital Illusion 65–66). The breakdown in the deterministic cause-and-effect mode of signification (signified-signifier-signmessage) has gradually led to what Baudrillard calls an “implosion of meaning,” and marked the starting point of simulation (Simulacra and Simulation 31). Caught in a web of myriads of images, people do not tell or listen to stories (the traditional carriers of meaning) anymore, nor

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seem to bother to distinguish between reliable and unreliable media of representation. Information conveyed through images is surrounded by an aura of plausibility that stories (particularly in written form) cannot match. The latter require not only the reception (by sensory perception) of their content but also, and more importantly, its processing through thought and, desirably, its filtering through an ethical system; the former, a prepackaged bundle of signs ready for consumption, empties itself of meaning in the process of “staging” communication.37 Communication by images seldom, if ever, leaves room for doubt because its truthfulness is taken for granted: images are reality. If storytelling, and particularly its written form, has gradually lost its primacy within the general framework of human communication, it is not only because of the intrinsic instability of narration as a carrier of meaning but also because of what Lacan refers to as “the ‘precarious’ status of reality” itself, or what Slavoj Žižek calls the “fantasy-frame of reality” (Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative 89). In the early 1990s, Žižek remarked that “although ‘reality’ is determined by ‘reality-testing,’ reality’s frame is structured by the left-overs of hallucinatory fantasy: the ultimate guarantee of our ‘sense of reality’ turns on how what we experience as ‘reality’ conforms to the fantasy-frame. (The ultimate proof of it is the experience of the ‘loss of reality’: ‘our world falls apart’ when we encounter something which, due to its traumatic character, cannot be integrated into our symbolic universe.)” (Tarrying with the Negative 89). It then follows that the triumph of information over storytelling is in fact due to nothing else but a generalized overrating of the former’s truthfulness to reality. By the same logic, what makes storytelling plausible would be our willingness to apply to the made-up reality of a story the same “fantasy-frame” that we use in “real” reality-testing. However, we are apparently less and less willing to do so, particularly when confronted with extreme events (which usually occur outside the fantasy-frame); instead, by an inverse compensating act, we compulsively try to recapture the Real—reality stripped of the fantasy-frame—by media which paradoxically exalt the spectacle of the image (or the simulacrum of an extreme event). “If the passion for the

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Real ends up in the pure semblance of the spectacular effect of the Real, then, in an exact inversion, the ‘postmodern’ passion for the semblance ends up in a violent return to the passion for the Real” (Žižek, Desert of the Real 9–10). In extreme cases, when the use of the fantasy-frame becomes insufficient for grounding a more or less stable sense of reality, people are known to resort to inflicting bodily harm on themselves, as if to make sure that their bodies are real. I have the so-called “cutters” in mind, that is, individuals who experience an urge to cut themselves with razors or to injure themselves by some other physical means. As Žižek explains, “Far from being suicidal, far from indicating a desire for selfannihilation, cutting is a radical attempt to (re)gain a hold on reality, or to ground the ego firmly in bodily reality, against the unbearable anxiety of perceiving oneself as nonexistent” (Desert of the Real 10). Or in other cases, no less extreme and recurring with a daily frequency, mass audiences are exposed to spectacular events that are supposed to document violence whose very extremity should be “spectacular” enough. Visual media both connect global viewers to bombings, massacres, and riots (by making them vicariously experience the destruction of their bodies), and at the same time disconnect them from these events (by affirming the indestructibility of their bodies). In The Return of the Real (1996), Hal Foster associates this postmodern “dis/connection” with the return of a fascistic subjecthood and the creation of a new “psychic nation.” Similarly, when Žižek describes the return to the passion for the Real as “violent,” he must have in mind the same destructive aspect inherent in the process of regaining one’s subjecthood and anchoredness in reality by experiencing the thrill of the other’s annihilation. Finding semblances of reality in fiction might prove to be a much easier task than pinpointing fictional elements in reality (applications of the fantasy-frame). The question is, of course, whether the latter are worth pursuing at all. The “passion for the Real” that seems to have overcome post-industrial societies in the last decades of the twentieth century and led to the (still ongoing) proliferation of “reality-TV” shows may have actually been “a fake passion whose ruthless pursuit of the Real behind appearances was the ultimate stratagem to avoid confronting the

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Real” (Žižek, Desert of the Real 24). About two decades before Žižek, Baudrillard already warned of a “scenario of power” which had come to replace the ideology of power. If once it was possible to recognize the truth behind the signs of a deformed reality, now trying to find the truth beneath the simulacrum has become more or less superfluous because the simulacrum does not hide any reality anymore but only models of it—signs of other signs.38 Paradoxically, the “murder of the Real” (Baudrillard’s phrase) does not occur in a world of imagination, illusion, and magic but in one devoid of them. * Images devoid of the power of imagination cannot inform humanity, let alone speak for it; we are who we are only by producing images through imagination.39 Robert Scholes’ call for “a cosmic imagination,” in Fabulation and Metafiction, already contained a warning against the danger of mankind’s losing touch with the universe: We need to be able to perceive the cosmos itself as an intricate, symmetrical, cunningly contrived, imaginative entity in which we can be as much at home as a character in a work of fiction. We must see man as himself imagined and being re-imagined, and now able to play a role in the re-imagination of himself. (Scholes 217)

Although Scholes’s language differs from Baudrillard’s or Žižek’s more recent, Lacanian jargon, one can recognize in his view of the “cosmos” as an “imaginative entity” and of the “work of fiction” an ontology based on the reality-(re)presentation dichotomy and centered on imagination—quite similar to the socio-critical theory that Baudrillard develops in The Vital Illusion. At his turn, Baudrillard warns against the modern dystopia of an “absolute reality,” against a world priding itself with having banned all illusion (the negative connotation it has assigned to imagination), evil, and even death; ours is a society headed toward a virtual reality of operational models where real events cannot even take place anymore—which in Baudrillard’s language means that humankind

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is becoming less and less capable of discerning real, meaningful events from “image-events,” continually bombarded as it is with already processed facts, data, and information.40 In the same spirit, William Robert Irwin’s The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy mentions R. G. Collingwood as saying that “[a] society which thinks . . . that it has outlived the need of magic, is either mistaken in that opinion, or else it is a dying society, perishing for lack of interest in its own maintenance” (Irwin 3). In Scholes’s “fabulation,” Baudrillard’s “illusion,” or Collingwood’s “magic,” I find the same vital ingredient that magical realist writing brings not only to literature in particular but also to our realitythirsty consciousness in general; it is a catalyst that neither negates reality nor creates a super-reality—or a parallel one, for that matter: it is what reconstructs a “felt reality,” the elusive reality of painful events that failed to be grasped when they occurred. Magical realism constitutes an attitude toward and, at the same time, a way of approaching reality—a reality that rarely is what it seems, or is seldom perceived in the same way by different subjects, in different places, at different times. It is the attitude that Franz Roh, the German art critic credited with coining the term magischer Realismus in 1925, must have had in mind when he wrote: “Humanity seems destined to oscillate forever between devotion to the world of dreams and adherence to the world of reality. And really, if this breathing rhythm of history were to cease, it might signal the death of the spirit” (Roh 17). It is such “oscillations” of the creative spirit that characterize most literatures which attempt to re-present and/ or work through trauma. Echoing Baudrillard, Žižek equates the gradual disappearance of illusion with the loss of reality itself. If reality-testing occurs, as mentioned, through the application of the fantasy-frame onto the real in order to integrate it into our symbolic universe (an integration that trauma renders impossible), it then follows that the very consistency of our reality cannot be sustained without fiction: “As soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency” (Tarrying with the Negative 88).41 Illusion is what ultimately helps us integrate

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even events from seemingly impossible experiences into a more or less rationally coherent system—and therein exactly lies the core paradox of magical realist fiction. Magic is the indispensable element by which the traumatic imagination re-arranges, reconstructs, and re-presents reality when mimetic reality-testing hits the wall of an unassimilated—and inassimilable—event. What Žižek loosely calls “symbolic fictions” are in fact the mode of writing born from fantasy and the uncanny, which I associate with magical realism: “The fundamental paradox of symbolic fictions,” writes Žižek, “is that, in one and the same move, they bring about the ‘loss of reality’ and provide the only possible access to reality: true, fictions are a semblance which occludes reality, but if we renounce fictions, reality itself dissolves” (Tarrying with the Negative 91). Significantly, it was modernism, of course, which first put into question the objectivity of realism and the truthfulness of the mimetic mode of representation. The roots of “symbolic fictions” can be traced back not only to modernism—which would explain why William Faulkner is considered by some as an early postmodernist (Gabriel García Márquez acknowledges him as his main source of inspiration)—but also to the larger phenomenon of modernity. According to Jean-François Lyotard, “Modernity, in whatever age it appears, cannot exist without a shattering of belief and without discovery of the ‘lack of reality’ of reality, together with the invention of other realities” (77). The only word in Lyotard’s statement whose accuracy I contest is “invention”: magical realism, a postmodern phenomenon par excellence, does not so much create new realities as it re-creates the existing one—often by pushing its limits, true, but even more often by enhancing its black holes, its inaccessible spaces. * What best illustrates the anchoredness of magical realism in postmodernist fiction is Ihab Hassan’s concept of silence and its inherent negativity.42 I understand Hassan’s “silence” as the real, that hole in signification which language can only capture by changing its own rules and re-constructing through imagination what otherwise cannot be perceived

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and spoken of (and for) through direct observation and reporting. Silence both empties and creates reality. “Silence de-realizes the world,” writes Hassan. “It encourages the metamorphosis of appearance and reality, the perpetual fusion and confusion of identities, till nothing—or so it seems—remains” (Hassan 13). Hassan’s remarks are probably the first references to postmodern aporia, the recognition and the admission of the reality of doubt (and the doubtfulness of reality) and, implicitly, of the difficulty of naming the truth. Moreover, they also seem to be alluding to the muteness of trauma, caused by unspeakable extremities that have taken hold of the psyche by shattering its reality-testing capacity: “Silence fills the extreme states of the mind—void, madness, outrage, ecstasy, mystic trance—when ordinary discourse ceases to carry the burden of meaning” (Hassan 13). The language of silence is the language of trauma—the language that writes silence, gives meaning to it, and converts it into history. Along the years, Hassan’s postmodernism has taken on additional meanings and led to a plethora of theoretical perspectives, not just on literature but also on culture as a whole. Preoccupied by the genealogy of the term that he applies to sundry literary works, Hassan himself points to its first use (postmodernismo) by Federico de Onís in Antología de la poesía española e hispanoamericana (1882–1932), published in 1934; and later by Dudley Fitts in his Anthology of Contemporary Latin-American Poetry of 1942; however, the first to speak of it “with more sweep than lapidary definition” was Charles Olson in the 1950s (261). Hassan has also been among the first theorists, followed closely by Jean-François Lyotard and Brian McHale, to point out the symbiotic, rather than causative, relationship between modernism and postmodernism. The two major cultural markers of the past century cannot be strictly delimited either in time, or by origins, content, and general characteristics. For Hassan, “history is a palimpsest, and culture is permeable to time past, time present, and time future. We are all […] a little Victorian, Modern, and Postmodern, at once. And an author may, in his or her own life time, easily write both a modernist and postmodernist work” (264). His considerations support my argument that 1) magical realism is a mode of writing that characterizes

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authors belonging to different periods and geo-cultural spaces; and 2) its tenets have become theoretical tools applicable to a variety of apparently non-related literary works, none of which can be called magical realist in or by itself. Hassan already remarked a general tendency to apply present models to the description of past concepts. Thus, when we try to define postmodernism, “we have [already] created in our mind a model of postmodernism, a particular typology of culture and imagination, and have proceeded to ‘rediscover’ the affinities of various authors and different moments with that model” (Hassan 264–265). When Linda Hutcheon (The Politics of Postmodernism, 2002) points out the dual character of postmodernism, as both an inscription and a subversion of conventions within the contemporary cultural and social forces, she seems to be echoing the same functions that Lyotard has attributed to the postmodern in general: its foregrounding of the unpresentable and, implicitly, its constant experimenting with new means of presentation. For Lyotard, these two functions, along with a simultaneous negation of traditional forms of presentation, define the postmodern and its palimpsestic relationship with the modern: “The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms […]; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable” (Lyotard 81). Lyotard’s definition also supports my argument that magical realism, as an essentially postmodernist mode of writing, deliberately stretches the limits of presentation exactly in order to re-create the unpresentable, or the otherwise inaccessible real. In aesthetic terms, the postmodern, and particularly magical realist writing, reaches for the sublime—that realm of beauty untouched by ethics and unquestioned by consciousness. According to Alessia Ricciardi, the postmodern sublime, even if it does not actually create meaning, at least reveals a poignant lack thereof, and thus sharpens the awareness of its inaccessibility: “When the imagination fails to present an object that might match the concept, the sublime brings to light the inhumanity of consciousness or the power to conceive. […] The postmodernist mentality exposes the unpresentable

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in the presentation itself, thus avoiding any nostalgic glamorizing of the unattainable” (Ricciardi 59). However, the self-reflectivity of postmodernist presentation, the conflation of medium and referent, still leaves open the question of what is actually being represented, that is, the identity of the referent. What used to be simulation for Baudrillard in the early 1980s would be pastiche for Fredric Jameson in the late 1990s. Jameson’s pastiche is not imitation in the sense of parody, but “speech in a dead language,” a “neutral practice of mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives,” that is, “blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs…” (Jameson 17); in other words, postmodernist pastiche is just another avatar of simulation. At their origin lies the process of reification, which turns representation upon itself by detaching the signifier from the signified and making the sign signify itself. Jameson’s postmodernism is “that pure and random play of signifiers […] which no longer produces monumental works of the modernist type but ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of preexistent texts, the building blocks of older cultural and social production, in some new and heightened bricolage: metabooks which cannibalize other books, metatexts which collate bits of other texts” (96). The immediate result of reshuffling, of re-arranging previous representations of reality, will always materialize in a new world of some kind, even if a deceptive one: likely to suggest both familiarity and strangeness, the re-created representation—or more accurately, the re-presentation—will always bear the distinctive mark of the uncanny. Jameson’s random—and sometimes not so random—play of signifiers thus becomes an inexhaustible source of new worlds, none of them necessarily parallel to ours, but superimposed: Hassan’s palimpsest. And yet, Hassan’s metaphor is not flawless for the simple reason that, at any point in time, it is always the last inscription that is visible on a palimpsest: the older reveal themselves only after one removes the surface layer of the writing. A more appropriate metaphor for the postmodernist sign would be the Worldwide Web, the web of links and hyperlinks that bounce off or lead toward each other, everywhere, and nowhere at the same time, but always dependent on each other’s existence and cue. Postmodernism is at the same time a

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web and a source of a multitude of ontological levels—a notion that must have prompted McHale to emphasize its ontological dominant, as different from modernism’s epistemological one. In his definition, “ontology is a description of a universe, not of the universe; that is, it may describe any universe, potentially a plurality of universes” (McHale 27), which might just as well be considered the premise by which magical realism explodes our real universe into myriads of magical universes, all new but at the same eerily recognizable as derivative from ours. Although it makes extensive use of metaphor—which has given skeptics enough reason to include it in the realm of allegory—the magical realist metaphor cannot reveal its original referent, just as simulation cannot point to any originals anymore. The postmodernist metaphoric act, as defined by Jameson, has led me to the conclusion that magical realist representation and hyperreality are, in fact, mutually inclusive: “The metaphoric act constitutively involves the forgetting or repression of itself: concepts generated by metaphor at once conceal their origins and stage themselves as true or referential; they emit a claim to being literal language” (Jameson 242). The magical realist metaphor seems, indeed, “more real than the real,” to use Baudrillard’s phrase here, because it is both medium and referent at the same time. Its oxymoronic constitution, including magic and reality, creates a special kind of dual signification: its meaning(s) can be read both literally and figuratively— depending on which ontological level, or on which side of the mirror, one happens to be—and is constantly fueled by the uncertainty and the hesitancy of the reader. “Postmodernist fiction […] is above all illusionbreaking art,” writes McHale, “it systematically disturbs the air of reality by foregrounding the ontological structure of texts and of fictional worlds” (McHale 221).43 On such shaky grounds, history and “truth” become relativized and dependent, more than ever before, on the texts that reconstruct them. Postmodern historiography substitutes “real” history with imaginary ones, which come to illuminate and fill the interstices of chronotopes that have eluded any kind of documentary recording or artistic representation. Rather than a psychological and an aesthetic phenomenon,

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“fantastic historiography” is viewed by Jameson as a sign of historical disempowerment: “[In postmodern ‘fantastic historiography’] the making up of unreal history is a substitute for the making of the real kind. […] Fabulation […] is no doubt the symptom of social and historical impotence, of the blocking of possibilities that leaves little option but the imaginary” (Jameson 369). In my view, however, fabulation— understood as creative imagination—is a psychic process with 1) an epistemological function, which not only creates meaning but also facilitates our access to it when signification hits a traumatic roadblock (in which case I refer to it specifically as the traumatic imagination); and 2) an aesthetic function, which invests with form and beauty the chaos surrounding us (the “vital illusion”). Moreover, the relationship between the real and the imaginary is not the same as the one between truth and untruth. Just as there is no History but a rhizomatic root of histories, there is no immanent Truth but only truths, fictional representations of reality. In his Postmodern Literary Theory (1997), Niall Lucy approaches the issue of truth from a Lacanian perspective: “[According to the Lacanian ‘mirror stage’] our sense of a true self relies on our sense of a symbolic self, or on a sense of self-as-other: our true self is nonoriginary, in other words. Hence ‘truth’ depends on ‘fiction’, which is a proposition that is often attributed to postmodernism as a kind of slogan and used to question its political commitment” (Lucy 25). In Lacan’s theory, a child inhabits the ‘imaginary’ order of pre-linguistic subject-object relations before he reaches selfhood; however, as soon as he enters the symbolic order, language, reason, and society become the dominant shaping factors of his identity. Accordingly, postmodernist truth finds expression in texts whose deliberately simplified syntax and diction often simulates children’s language. Magical realist narratives, for instance, usually adopt a style whose simplicity and clarity contrast the violence and the horror of their plots. Their usually unreliable narrators use dictions and tones reminiscent of a child’s speech, or, depending on their age, of a mentally handicapped person’s ramblings. Only children and fools can afford the luxury of inhabiting the imaginary without having to worry about socio-cultural pressures.

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If truth depends on fiction, it is not the kind of truth that Baudrillard must have had in mind; what Baudrillard seemed to be wary of was truth as principle, that is, as a framing discourse that shuts out any alternative perspectives on events: “We must no longer assume any principle of truth, of causality, or any discursive norm,” he warned in The Vital Illusion (2000). “Instead, we must grant both the poetic singularity of events and the radical uncertainty of events” (68). The uncertainty of an event, of course, resides not in the event per se but in the witness’ mind, and is more often than not caused by a caesura in the event’s perception. Hesitancy in accepting the reality of an event is the very reaction that fantastic literature, including magical realism, induces in its readers, who always act as secondary witnesses of sorts; it is a response that should not be understood so much as an unwillingness to acknowledge the event’s “poetic singularity” but as a readiness to keep an open mind toward several—often even contradictory—ways of perception and understanding. Not questioning reality—or rejecting ab initio its essential dialectics based on such antithetical pairs as truefalse, possible-impossible, natural-supernatural (or unnatural), goodevil, and so forth—is what may ultimately lead to its demise. This is the reasoning that must stand behind Baudrillard’s line of thought when he writes that “illusion is the general rule of the universe; reality is but an exception. If the same were identical to the same, we would be faced with an absolute reality, with the unconditional truth of things. But absolute truth is the other name for death” (The Vital Illusion 72). Equating absolute reality with death could, of course, be assigned to a latent Existentialist streak in Baudrillard’s philosophy. In this perspective, illusion does not amount to a distraction—a diversionary tactic meant to ignore the ultimate reality of death—but rather to an acute awareness of reality and its rhizomatic structure, in which none of the roots is less true or less untrue than the other. However, the idea of multiple truths may easily take one onto the thin ice of ethics as soon as one applies it to history in general, and to its unspeakable atrocities in particular. The relativity of truth is a risk that postmodernist fiction has always seemed willing to take.

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By re-constructing history in their texts, postmodernist writers seem to suggest that history itself is but a form of fiction, and “conversely, fiction, even fantastic or apocryphal or anachronistic fiction, can compete with the official record as a vehicle of historical truth” (McHale 96). Although both official history and historical fiction are constructed as texts, only the former is likely to be accepted as “real” reality, while the latter is usually considered as just a playful and unreliable reflection of it. “In postmodernist revisionist historical fiction,” writes McHale, “history and fiction exchange places, history becoming fictional and fiction becoming ‘true’ history—and the real world seems to get lost in the shuffle. But of course this is precisely the question postmodernist fiction is designed to raise: real, compared to what?” (96). McHale’s question reflects the intrinsic anxiety of the postmodern consciousness and the general aporia inherent in postmodern knowledge. There is, of course, no short answer to it, but if there were one, it would probably be that “reality is what we want it to be.” Hutcheon offers a simplified explanation of the process of representation by distinguishing “the brute events of the past and the historical facts we construct out of them. Facts are events to which we have given meaning. Different historical perspectives therefore derive different facts from the same events” (54). The “brute” events happened regardless of whether one’s consciousness has already acknowledged them or not, and they are first turned into facts only after consciousness has invested them with meaning. The moment one as much as mentions an event, without assigning it any particular meaning, one has already engaged in the process of signification by using a signifier (a word): “event” (or its specific designation: “battle,” “revolt,” “riot,” etc.). As far as the subject is concerned, any event without a signifier would simply remain a non-event. Moreover, even a non-event can be turned into fact by an act of signification, or, to put it in postmodernist terms, by simulation. For example, on the night of Halloween in 1938, CBS radio put on an Orson Welles adaptation of H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds, to which many Americans reacted as though a Martian invasion were actually happening. According to the news reports of the time, the result was allegedly mass hysteria, with people actually

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fleeing from their homes and cities. Was the Martian invasion an event or a fact? It was a “brute” event turned into fact—only there had been no event to begin with. Nevertheless, it was also a non-event because the people’s reaction to something that never happened was based solely on a deceiving process of signification: they invested a non-existent referent with meaning, or, more specifically, they turned fictional history (alien invasion) into real history. Moreover, because the radio-drama itself was based on a work of fiction (H. G. Wells’s book), which in its turn was the representation of a non-existent referent, it follows that the mass panic of 1938 was in fact caused by the simulacrum of a technically superior military (“Martian”) invasion. The Orson Welles experiment was an instance of building a narrative based on a pre-existent representation of an imaginary event. Postmodernist historical fiction is created in a similar fashion, by simulation—a reshuffling of the “real” events of what is generally viewed as the “official” past—and may achieve sometimes quite as close an impact on the reading audience. As a general rule of fiction writing, authors and their narratives do not “explain” or “demonstrate”: they tell, show, render, create, or construct. Explaining is what critics do. The postmodernists’ view of present culture as the result of past representations lies at the basis of most fictional works that re-create history from new perspectives, in a search for fresh understandings of it. Therefore, quite literally, “[t]he representation of history becomes the history of representation” (Hutcheon 55). Postmodernist fiction in general and magical realist fiction in particular create impressions of reality from what Baudrillard has called the hyperreal, or the reality of signs of other signs. Re-presenting postmodern hyperreality (the excess of reality provided by an omnipresent process of simulation and successive layers of simulacra) as fictional reality is what I call “writing the vanishing real” by a deliberate and rigorous, but also playful, use of imagination. Simulation lives on as fabulation: postmodernist fiction does not stop at only signifying other signs, but also engages in Frankensteinian experiments of creating new ones (sometimes even just as monstrous as Mary W. Shelley’s hodgepodge

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creature). García Márquez’s Macondo is not a Latin American village, but bears all the signs of one, just as Faulkner’s Yoknawpatawpha County is not the American South, but is hardly different from the real late-nineteenth-century Mississippi. However, similitude does not reside in the relationship between the referent (the real-life chronotope) and its fictional signified (the artistic chronotope), just as verisimilitude is not inherent in the re-created referent per se. Similitude and verisimilitude belong exclusively to the subjective perspective of the receiver (reader, or viewer in the case of filmic narratives): both are results of the audience’s imagination and empathy. In postmodern literary theory, the reader and the process of reading are the sine qua non of the literary experience, of the actualization of the literary text. Every literary text may be read in different ways, depending on the readers’ subjectivity, their cultural background, the political environment, and the larger socio-historical context—hence Niall Lucy’s rhetorical question, “once society is seen to function as a work of literature, why should anyone believe that there is any rational basis on which to judge one ‘reading’ as better than another? There is no right reading of any text, but only a multiplicity of readings” (Lucy 246–247). Readers are the ones who ultimately complete and validate the process of signification initiated by the author: it is only with them, and in them, that meaning may come about. Traditionally, critics attributed this function to the author only.44 Michel Foucault was among the first to contest the until then singular relevance of the “author-function.” According to Foucault, “The author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works, he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction” (Foucault 186). Multiplicity of meaning ultimately comes from the reader; it is the reader who rewrites the text with each repetition of the literary experience, during each immersion into the world of fiction. The postmodern understanding of the reader is far from that of an individual identity with a personal history and psychological

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makeup: unlike the author, the reader (or the “scriptor” in Roland Barthes’ terminology) comes to life at the same time as the text being read. Barthes consistently emphasizes the performative aspect of fiction, which, according to him, functions as any other linguistic utterance because “there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now” (Barthes, “The Death of the Author” 148–149). Barthes uses the word écriture not for what is written or the text (which would correspond to the English noun “writing,” as in “Faulkner’s writings”) but rather for the act of writing, the partial synonym of l’écrire (roughly the English gerund “writing,” as in “magical realist writing”). Thus, from the reader’s standpoint, the act of reading involves the instantaneous re-writing of the text and the completion of its signification. Both writing and reading (re-writing) function as speech acts, consuming themselves in the same instant in which they occur. “Writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, ‘depiction’…” remarks Barthes (148–149); instead, writing is enunciation, a performative act of creating signification. While the author recedes in the background of his narrative, narrator, characters (narratees), and reader become one: in the reader’s imagination, ontological boundaries collapse as long as the process of reading/re-writing lasts.45 Any vicarious experience presents at least one essential advantage over its real-life counterpart: it can be ended by the subject (author or reader) at any time, whenever it is perceived (felt) as too painfully “real.” It is this dual ontological makeup of fiction that underlies my description of the traumatic imagination—which I see as permeating most postmodernist and particularly magical realist writing—as a consciousness of survival. Even if an author (usually a primary or secondary witness of extreme events) or readers (always limited to secondary or tertiary witnessing) may live or re-live the anxiety, the pain, the suffering, or even the death inflicted by violent events, the traumatic imagination, however painful in itself, will always allow them to keep—or create—a safety distance which can guarantee at least their immediate survival (immediate because there is always the sometimes lethal risk of a delayed

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re-traumatization). According to McHale, “insofar as postmodernist fiction foregrounds ontological themes and ontological structure, we might say that it is always about death” (231). It might, indeed, be about death most of the time, but not all the time, simply because not “every ontological boundary is an analogue or metaphor of death,” as McHale would want us to believe. Imagination—or more specifically, the traumatic imagination—is the human faculty that makes death, “the unthinkable,” available (and somewhat more palatable) to consciousness in the first place, by re-creating (simulating) it in fiction. The challenge that postmodernist fiction faces is twofold: first, it intends to recapture the mass-scale horrors of centuries of human history by re-creating events that resist traditional means of description and turning them into “felt” reality; and second, when it comes to contemporary atrocities, postmodernist fiction must counteract the danger of desensitization created by the impact of audio-visual media. The latter task might prove even more difficult than the former: adding yet another layer of simulacra to an already oversaturated world of representations and no referents would only seem to perpetuate Baudrillard’s “hyperreal.” However, fiction keeps alive not the sham of prepackaged information but the illusion and the mystery inherent in phenomenal knowledge, particularly when the object of that knowledge is death or pain. Magical realism writes the vanishing real: vanishing either because it has become too familiar and trite, or because it has been blurred by successive layers of simulacra. Unlike Baudrillard’s depthless hyperreal, magical realist hyperreality is an unexplained but felt, a missed but re-livable kind of reality. It might be the only reality where one can remember in order to forget trauma. ***

CHAPTER 3

WRITING PAIN AND MAGIC MAGICAL REALISM AS POSTMODERN FANTASY The relationship between imagination and pain reveals a complexity that one would normally not expect to find between the mental faculty of creating images and that of shutting down all mental activity, including that of perceiving images. Unlike the products of imagination, pain can hardly be expressed in language because, as Elaine Scarry claims, pain is “objectless, it cannot easily be objectified in any form, material or verbal. But it is also its objectlessness that may give rise to imagining…” (Scarry 161–162). If imagination compensates for the objectlessness of pain, it follows that postmodernist fiction and particularly its most imaginative mode of writing, magical realism, succeed in simulating pain by turning it into objects (images) that literary language can convey more suitably (in regard to their unspeakable nature) and more effectively (in terms of their accessibility by both author and reader). These would be the images of “felt” reality: history is not what hurt, but “what we say once hurt,” as Linda Hutcheon would say.

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Scarry situates the two “states,” pain and imagination, at opposite poles in terms of their relationship with their objects: more specifically, “while pain is a state remarkable for being wholly without objects, the imagination is remarkable for being the only state that is wholly its objects” (Scarry 162). However, Scarry seems to miss the active nature of imagination: “There is in imagining no activity, no ‘state,’ no experienceable condition or felt-occurrence separate from the objects: the only evidence that one is ‘imagining’ is that imaginary objects appear in the mind” (Scarry 162). Objects do not just “appear” in the mind—or if they do, they are products of hallucination and not of imagination. Imagination, and especially the traumatic imagination, is an activity by which the human consciousness translates an unspeakable state—pain—into a readable image; it is the process by which shock chronotopes become artistic chronotopes. The traumatic imagination uses the sublimative power of language in order to turn that which resists representation into a new and more tangible reality. Scarry considers pain and imagining “the ‘framing events’ within whose boundaries all other perceptual, somatic, and emotional events occur,” then concludes that “between the two extremes can be mapped the whole terrain of the human psyche” (164–165). Between pain and imagination, I would add, can be mapped the whole fictional strategy of the magical realist writing mode, in which appearances are made more real than the real. * The most comprehensive literary mode to make use of imagination is fantasy. The popular appeal of fantasy literature, as demonstrated by J. K. Rowling’s bestselling Harry Potter series and the blockbuster film versions of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, comes to vindicate to a certain extent Baudrillard’s insistence on the need for a “vital illusion,” for a recognition of “the poetic singularity of events and the radical uncertainty of events.” In clear opposition to a world increasingly dominated by information and an uncanny obsession with absolute truth, “the invitation fantasy extends to the reader [is] to recover a belief which has been beclouded by knowledge, to renew a faith which

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has been shattered by fact” (Timmerman 1).46 What seems to appeal to both producers (authors) and receivers (reader) of the fantasy effect is the intrinsic hesitation between two modes of discourse: the mimetic/ reflective and the marvelous/creative. Such hesitation, remarks Lance Olsen, “arises at times of excessive cultural unease, and it is little wonder that pure fantasy has come to the fore in narrative since, roughly, the 1940s, and the rise of postmodernism” (Olsen 22). However, fantasy is not an escape from reality, an artificial parallel universe meant to bring the solace that reality has kept denying us through the storms of our history. Fantasy, including its specific and closely related genres (e.g., the fantastic) and modes of writing (e.g., magical realism), is meant, rather, to strengthen our anchoredness in our known reality by filling the void, the black holes, in our experiences of it. According to Rosemary Jackson, fantasy is a “literature of desire”: “Fantasy characteristically attempts to compensate for a lack resulting from cultural constraints: it is a literature of desire, which seeks that which is experienced as absence and loss” (Jackson 3). It is this reality-compensatory function that validates the nexus between magical realist writing and the artistic shock chronotopes, on the one hand, and traumatic events and shock chronotopes, on the other. The mimetic/ reflective mode of discourse cannot create the type of “felt reality” that the marvelous/creative one has so efficiently proven to be able to. The newly created reality is not to be viewed so much as an invention but rather as a rearrangement, a reshuffling of the known elements of our world; nevertheless, the impression left on the receiver is one of novelty and strangeness, even if in an uncanny fashion.47 If there is any desire in fantasy literature, it is not to recapture what has been experienced as loss (or failed to be experienced as such) but to try to signify it, to endow it with some kind of meaning; paradoxically, what makes fantasy fantasy is in fact the perpetual failure to achieve that much-desired complete signification. The hesitation between two modes of discourse (one realistic and one imaginary), which necessarily characterizes the reader and the narrator/character of fantasy, creates what Olsen calls an “ellipse of uncertainty.”48 The opposite is equally true: only as long as there is an

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ellipse of uncertainty in the text can the fantasy mode function as such. In postmodern fantasy, meaning appears as a fata morgana that keeps attracting the thirsty traveler (the meaning-avid reader) while staying forever out of his reach: “ ‘meaning’ is contained in the failure to achieve ‘meaning’ ” (Olsen 31). To put it in psychoanalytical terms, in the case of Kafka, Borges, and Robbe-Grillet, for example, “instead of ‘meaning,’ the reader confronts the literary equivalent of Freudian Nachträglichkeit or ‘deferredness of meaning,’ whereby the story almost makes sense, but not quite, and where the almost-having-meaning seems to promise that meaning has only been deferred temporarily” (Olsen 31). Evidently, that promise will constantly turn out as sham, and thus keep the “desire” alive and the resulting fantasy effect operational. As a literary mode, fantasy includes several related genres— discussed at length by Tzvetan Todorov in his seminal study The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre—and writing modes, such as magical realism, which tend to monopolize the literary landscape of certain historical periods. Most of these periods happen to be the most violent and traumatizing in humankind’s entire history, attesting, in a way, to the universally human significance and poignantly humanistic function of the literary mode. Only by remembering the unspeakable events of the past can human society ultimately acquire the kind of knowledge that will, ideally, lead to their understanding—or at least partial signification. The interdependence of memory and imagination, and particularly the strict reliance of the former on the latter, explain to a great extent the importance of fantasy in the act of remembering. “If we view fantasy as a privileging of knowledge over being and symptom as a privileging of being over knowledge,” writes Linda Belau, “it is not too difficult to see that remembering, caught up in the chain of knowledge as it is, is grounded in fantasy” (Belau xvi). However, what is remembered—or imagined, for that matter— involves phenomena much more complex than just a revisitation of the past: remembering and imagining are processes driven less by their real objects (past events) than by the subject’s attitude and emotions toward the reminisced reality.

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The fact that individuals react emotionally to an object of memory, to “something real yet non-occurrent,” counts probably among the few uncontested claims of psychology. Norman Kreitman assigns the cause of this reaction to imagination, “taken in the broadest sense to be the active contemplation of that which is not present” (“Fantasy and Feelings” 3). It is the active quality of imagination that ultimately distinguishes fantasy from memory because the objects of imagination, unlike those of memory, are often both intentional and emotional.49 Conversely, fantasy cannot reconstruct the past without using concrete elements from previous experiences, regardless of the positivity or negativity of their emotional charge. What does matter, however, is renewing one’s connectedness to the past, and particularly its traumatizing events (or establishing a connection to it for the very first time), by rearranging its composing elements. Kreitman also notes that “while reminiscence may comprise little more than agreeable recollections of pleasant occasions, it can also contribute to the reinterpretation of the past, including ‘coming to terms’ with its more unpleasant aspects, a process which requires the reorganization of construct systems” (“Language, Fantasy and Psychoanalysis” 83). Thus, it becomes even more evident that, while reorganizing reality bears the mark of a certain teleology (to come to terms with the past), the activity is driven not so much by reason, if at all, as it is by feelings; and feelings are what we usually assign to constructs, maybe expectably so, because of their extra-linguistic character. The term “construct” refers to the attributes by which we organize the perceived elements of an environment (cold-hot, far-near, lightdark, etc.). As Kreitman explains, “Most of the constructs we habitually employ are prereflexive, and many are preverbal. […] If the elements being construed are in any way connected with our wellbeing, they are emotionally charged” (Kreitman, “Fantasy and Feelings” 6). As soon as a construct leaves the realm of the unconscious and the extra-lingual, it becomes a concept. The role played by language in this transformation is crucial: language is the only tool at the human subject’s disposal that enables him or her to turn constructs into conceptual systems of different degrees of complexity and abstraction. However, not all constructs

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come to be indexed linguistically, and even those that do will never yield perfectly corresponding concepts (Kreitman, “Fantasy and Feelings” 7–8). These psychological distinctions may explain the exceptional ability of magical realist writing (as a submode of fantasy) to convey objects of memory too elusive to be rendered by realistic descriptions. If there is a Real, the Lacanian hole in signification, then I can only imagine it as the realm of constructs, and invest my belief in magical realist language and its capacity to transform, however imperfectly, those emotional objects into concepts, that is, into images that I can visualize, feel, and maybe partially understand. The deceptive simplicity of magical realist images, their coherence, vividness, and emotional charge are able to help readers see and feel—without necessarily understanding—the indescribable horrors of the past. Magical realism writes the vanishing real by supplanting it with a hybrid reality of emotionally relevant constructs (corresponding roughly to the magical/creative part of the writing mode) and partially processed concepts (corresponding to its realistic/descriptive part). The primacy of the reality of constructs (the pre-linguistic organization of reality) in fantasy representations would apply particularly to cases when a conceptualization of the existential reality (the actual events) has become problematic because of its traumatic nature. And although it is incontestably the author’s memory and imagination that tackle the Real and the objects of the past in the first place, “in fantasy, meaning is appropriated by the reader rather than given by the author.” John H. Timmerman uses the theological term “anagogic insight” for readers’ interpretation of the story, which, he claims, follows a pattern laid down for them by the author: “By repetition of pointing signals, or symbols, the author constructs a pattern which guides the interpretation. But in no sense does the writer force the pattern upon the reader. The reader, by following the pattern, claims the anagogic insight as his own” (8). The reader of fantasy is thus Barthes’s modern scriptor who rewrites the text while reading it. The world of fantasy is not a dream world but a re-created version of our own reality—a reality that has been infused with a “vital illusion” (Baudrillard’s term) in order to save its mystery and abstractness amidst

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the general onslaught of information and facts. The world of fantasy is not an escape from reality but an enhancement of a “real” reality which tends to escape us—more often than not as a symptom of trauma. Fantasy “evokes” a fictional world in our minds, and its “immediacy is opposed, for example, to the nineteenth-century notion of ‘suspension of disbelief,’ with which we enter the work pretending for a time that this might be real. In fantasy, given a certain groundwork, the story is real” (Timmerman 50). The story is real because it appeals not so much to the readers’ (scriptors’) judgment as it does to their imagination and emotions. Therefore, their response is not “pretended” (by an intentional suspension of disbelief) but genuinely reflexive: they react to the reality of the story as they would to their own, to already known, uncannily familiar experiences. Of course, the basic traits of fantasy appear to different extents in its submodes and subgenres: the fantastic, the uncanny, the marvelous, and magical realism. * The fantastic constitutes itself not only by a transgression of the rules on which we have based our real-life experiences but also—and maybe more importantly—by a change of the intrinsic rules of the text and of the way we read it. The reality of the text is just as versatile (and fragile) as the one outside of it. In 1974, Irène Bessière remarked in Le récit fantastique: La poétique de l’incertain (The Fantastic Narrative: The Poetics of the Uncertain) that “fantastic fiction constructs another world with words, thoughts, and realities from our own. This new universe, developed in the plot of the narrative, comes together between the lines and between the words, in the play of images and beliefs, of logic and affects [reason and emotions], both contradictory and generally accepted” (Bessière 11–12, my translation50). Bessière lays emphasis on the creation of a new ontological level in the very structure of the text, whose novelty, however, remains deceptive: readers are actually presented with their own world, intentionally made to appear as new and strange. In this context, the fantastic seems to be defined as yet another form of fantasy or of the imaginary in general. In one of the

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earliest (1965) works on the fantastic, Inside the Fantastic (Au coeur du fantastique), Roger Caillois already wrote that “the sense of the term ‘fantastic’ is purely negative: it refers to everything that in some respect distances itself from the photographic reproduction of the real, that is, to every fantasy, to every stylization, and evidently, to the imaginary in its entirety” (Caillois 22, my translation51). Unlike Bessière’s, however, Caillois’s definition is rather general and seems to go beyond the literary. It is also necessary to note that the French language differentiates between the masculine noun “le fantastique” and the feminine “la fantastique,” where the former refers to specific works and narratives, while the latter, used mainly by anthropologists and philosophers, “describes a category of the imagination, understood not as the ability to produce simulacra of the real but to develop images related to the real, which reorganize it by following the rules of the human psyche, defined as the conflation of beliefs, affects, and reason. The fantastic [le fantastique] is just one of the processes of the imagination” (Bessière 30–31, my emphases and translation52). The distinction is important because it can help to define the traumatic imagination as a category of the imagination usually called upon when the human psyche has lost its ability to represent the real—on the very account of the real’s ungraspable nature. Consequently, the traumatic imagination will construct images with a semblance of reality (will re-present the real) but at the same time based on the subjects’ beliefs and emotions, and to a much lesser extent, on their judgment. By analogy, the traumatic imagination would be an equivalent of sorts of “la fantastique” (a category of the imagination) and magical realist writing the correspondent of “le fantastique” (a process of the imagination). More than any other category of the imagination, the traumatic operates almost exclusively with unprocessed elements of the real (unassimilated previous experiences), relying instead on the subjects’ affective memory, or, to use Kreitman’s terminology, on their preverbal construct systems. To other theorists, the fantastic itself is an affect. Similarly to Bessière, who traces the fantastic in the creation of another ontological level within the structure of the text, Eric S. Rabkin believes that “[t]he

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key to the fantastic is not to be found in simple comparison with the real world but in examination of the reading process. […] The fantastic is an affect generated as we read by the direct reversal of the ground rules of the narrative world” (Rabkin 20–21). The reading process needs to be understood here in its Barthesian sense of a rewriting (by the reader/ scriptor) of the author’s text: thus, the fantastic is not to be regarded as the exclusive creation of an author but as a regenerating phoenix that rises from its ashes with each act of reading. (The metaphor is not random: every act of reading consumes itself as a unique utterance, as an unrepeatable act of speech; the next instance of reading will never be the same as the ones preceding it.) The fantastic is alive only as long as the reader/scriptor keeps it alive—which mostly happens through his “textualization.” The textualization of the reader means his involvement into the reality of text, the suspension of his armchair detachment and invulnerability: the reader is directly affected by the world that he reads about, and thus rewrites. The fantastic is also alive as long as the reader, along with the characters in the narrative, hesitates between a natural/scientific and a supernatural explanation of the uncanny phenomena occurring in the text. “The fantastic […] implies an integration of the reader into the world of the characters,” wrote Tzvetan Todorov about half a decade before Bessière and Rabkin; “that world is defined by the reader’s own ambiguous perception of the events narrated” (Todorov 31). Todorov’s work The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1968) analyzes the fantastic as a border genre rather than as an autonomous one. According to Todorov, at least three conditions need to be met in order to generate the fantastic effect: First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character […]—the actual reader identifies himself with the character. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the

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The first condition is essential for the maintenance of the fantastic effect throughout the narrative; the second pertains to the textualization of the reader, his involvement in and affectedness by the story; and the third excludes all allegorical interpretations of the events described in the text. Paradoxically, the reader is not required to suspend his disbelief (i.e., to abide by the rules of the text, as he would do in the case of a fairy-tale, for example), but, on the contrary, to accept its magical elements as integral parts of his reality. Depending on the reader’s reaction to the phenomena shown in the text, Todorov distinguishes two different genres, the uncanny and the marvelous: “If [the reader] decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we say that the work belongs to [the] genre [of] the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous” (41). Consequently, because the reader of the fantastic text cannot choose any of these explanations, Todorov places the fantastic somewhere in between the uncanny and the marvelous, doubting its status as a genre in its own right. According to him, the fantastic can only be defined as a border genre, at best.53 The reader’s identification with the character, his complete immersion into the world of fiction, is essential to the way in which he perceives the narrated events and, implicitly, to his state of hesitation. The fantastic effect, however, can live only in the present. Todorov makes an inestimable contribution to the understanding of the genre when he contrasts it in a temporal perspective with the marvelous and the uncanny: “The marvelous corresponds to an unknown phenomenon, never seen as yet, still to come—hence to a future; in the uncanny, on the other hand, we refer the inexplicable to known facts, to a previous experience, and thereby to the past. As for the fantastic itself, the hesitation which characterizes it cannot be situated, by and large, except in the present” (42). Besides the temporal reference, there is also a “referent”

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reference that separates the uncanny from the fantastic; if the former describes the readers’ and/or the characters’ emotional reactions to certain events, the latter belongs to the events themselves. With Todorov, the Freudian meaning of the uncanny as feeling or emotional response is extended to that of literary genre. In the 1970s, however, Todorov’s theory was not altogether new; about half a century before, Viktor Shklovsky had already defined the function of art, which is, according to the Russian Formalist, “to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.” By emphasizing the formal aspect of art, as opposed to its referential qualities, Shklovsky’s argument already pointed to recognizable characteristics of the uncanny especially when it enunciated the concepts of “defamiliarization” (or “estrangement”) and “games of nonrecognition”—textual strategies that writers deliberately play in order to wrap the familiar in an aura of strangeness. To this purpose, they may use such techniques as “withholding the name of the object, describing an event or object as if for the first time, or naming corresponding parts of another object instead of the object described” (cited in Warnes 85). By virtue of their propensity for understatements, magical realist images rely mostly on the latter, that is, on synecdoche. When Rosemary Jackson states that the “instability of narrative is at the centre of the fantastic as a mode” (34), she reiterates Todorov’s first condition for the creation of the fantastic effect. Furthermore, the uncertainty shared by reader, narrator, and character extends the unstable reality status of the events described as real in the text. According to Jackson, “The narrator is no clearer than the protagonist about what is going on, nor about interpretation; the status of what is being seen and recorded as ‘real’ is constantly in question” (34). The questioning of the “real” generated in and by the text is not to be viewed as some kind of gratuitous fictional game, a play of smoke and mirrors meant to maintain uncertainty and fear in the narrator/character and the reader. What the fantastic actually brings into question is the extreme event that has been missed, or just partially witnessed, and has therefore remained unpresentable: “The fantastic traces the unsaid and the unseen of

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culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made ‘absent’ ” (Jackson 4). The fantastic writes trauma, the wound that will not heal, the injury that needs telling―the vanishing real. The nexus to trauma set up by Jackson in the eighties was not altogether new. In 1974, Bessière had already written that “[Each] theme [of a fantastic narrative] serves to give the semblance of truth to that which has never existed. The author of a fantastic narrative comes close to a magician, who shows in order to better hide, who describes in order to transcribe the unspeakable” (33, my translation).54 A narrative of contraries, the fantastic is for Bessière “particularly capable [apte] to evoke the extreme traits of the real. […] It corrects the powerlessness of literature to grasp the everyday” (62).55 This corrective gesture also characterizes magical realist writing, whose textual strategies are not too different from those of the fantastic; after all, magical realism originates as an offshoot of the fantastic, and both modes are tributaries of fantasy. The extreme everyday eludes all traditional realistic modes of representation because of its closeness to the limits of reason: where reason leaves off, imagination takes over. The fantastic narrative may thus be seen as “the transcription of the imaginary experience of the limits of reason [la transcription de l’expérience imaginaire des limites de la raison]” (Bessière 62). The transcription requires, of course, a certain kind of imagination, which I have called “traumatic,” and which is uniquely suited to reconstruct memories of violent events and to evoke the emotions associated to them. And because authorship is not the author’s monopoly alone, the traumatic imagination also defines the reader/scriptor’s re-authoring of the text. The involvement of the reader in the world of the text, his “textualization,” is one of the characteristics that place the fantastic at the core of postmodernist fiction. Taking his cue from Todorov’s definition of the fantastic, Brian McHale remarks that Todorov’s epistemological approach (using the reader’s dual reactions to the supernatural) does not support the existence of any affinities between the fantastic and postmodernism. Unlike Todorov, McHale uses an ontological perspective according to which the postmodernist fantastic is “one of a number of

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strategies of an ontological poetics that pluralizes the ‘real’ and thus problematizes representation” (75). His critique of Todorov’s theory points at its superficiality: Todorov fails to explain such instances when narrator and characters remain apparently indifferent at the intrusion of the supernatural into the text: Todorov’s epistemological approach simply does not get to the bottom of the fantastic. That ‘bottom,’ the deep structure of the fantastic, is, I would argue, ontological rather than epistemological. […] Sometimes the confrontation [between the natural and the supernatural norms] is understated to the point of bland acquiescence, and the fantastic flattens out into that tone of unfantastic banality that Todorov found so problematic; at other times, it is strenuously agonistic. (McHale 75)

When characters take supernatural events in their stride, the tone of the narrative might get trite or “unfantastic,” indeed, but on the other hand the fantastic effect increases. The characters’ unquestioning of out-ofthis-world events contrasts the readers’ amazement by them; McHale calls this conflict the “rhetoric of contrastive banality.” “Far from smothering or neutralizing the fantastic effect, as Todorov apparently believed it would, this ‘banalization’ of the fantastic actually sharpens and intensifies the confrontation between the normal and paranormal” (McHale 76–77). The confrontation is fueled by the readers’ disbelief of, and resistance against, paranormal occurrences; by the rhetoric of contrastive banality, postmodernist fiction highlights the ontological confrontation inherent in the fantastic (McHale 77), which does not mean, however, that every text with an antithetical ontological structure is fantastic. On a more deferential tone, McHale acknowledges that “Todorov does have a point: the fantastic no longer seems to be the exclusive property of texts which are identifiably fantastic in their ontological structure; a generalized fantastic effect or ‘charge’ seems to be diffused throughout postmodernist writing, making its presence felt in displaced forms in texts that are not formally fantastic at all” (81). By the same token, I believe that magical realist writing, a submode of the fantastic,

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characterizes texts that have not been, nor could have been, labeled as magical realist in their entirety. The magical realist effect can be traced in a variety of postmodernist texts that try to write trauma―by bearing witness to it and ultimately working through it. If “[t]he literature of the fantastic leaves us with two notions: that of reality and that of literature, each as unsatisfactory as the other” (Todorov 168), magical realism, I believe, comes to close that gap by saturating the text with realistic details and at the same time conferring reality the magical aura of fiction. * In order to be applied to a variety of literary works, or sometimes only to a few images in one and the same work, the concept of magical realism needs to be understood through the various definitions it has been assigned since 1925; in its relation to other modes and genres of fantasy; as a term indispensable to the analysis of many modern postmodern literary texts; in the larger context of postmodernist historical fiction; and as the artistic result of the traumatic imagination. As a theoretical tool, the concept of magical realism has yet to prove its efficiency in the analysis of works documenting violent histories and in interdisciplinary approaches to narratives writing trauma. Coined in 1925 by Franz Roh, in the original preface to NachExpressionismus, Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten Europäischen Malerei, the term “magical realism” was first applied to European post-Expressionistic painting. The subsequent definitions and various applications of the term have since demonstrated its versatility and usefulness in analyses of artistic representations of reality, including fiction. The fact that magical realism has less to do with magic than it does with reality was already made clear in Roh’s understanding of “magic”: “With the word ‘magic,’ as opposed to ‘mystic,’ I wish to indicate that mystery does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it…” (16). Four decades later, Luis Leal used a similar trope when he stated that the magical realist tries “to seize the mystery that breathes behind things” (123), and at the turn of the millennium, Jean

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Baudrillard spoke of “the poetic singularity of events” (68) in The Vital Illusion. Whether it is the mystery that “palpitates” behind the world or “breathes behind things,” or the vital illusion that saves the uniqueness of events in a tidal wave of facts and information, the object of magical realism is not the ontological split of our universe or its substitution with another one but the imaginative access to the most intimate recesses of our reality. By imaginative access to reality I understand a Trojan horse of sorts, which carries inside it the fictional elements supposed to bring down the “defenses” of the real: in this context, fiction is not so much opposed to the real (aiming for its destruction) as it is instrumental to penetrating and conquering it. “To depict realistically is not to portray or copy but rather to build rigorously, to construct objects that exist in the world in their particular primordial shape,” explains Roh in his preface. “For the new [post-Expressionist] art, it is a question of representing before our eyes, in an intuitive way, the fact, the interior figure, of the exterior world” (24). By the “primordial shape” of worldly objects Roh most likely means the construct stage of reality, the preverbal system characterizing subject-object relations described by Kreitman: it is a world that, although intuited, has not been conceptualized yet, and its final shape will be achieved by rebuilding it and by revealing, in the same process, its “interior figure.” Magical realism constructs objects that exist in their “primordial shape” exactly because those are, more often than not, the objects that tend to take over a subject’s life: unacknowledged but repeatedly acted out for no apparent reason. It is no wonder then that magical realism appears right on the heels of the First World War, the first modern historical event that ushered in the era of technologized and highly efficient mass slaughter. The widespread use and persistence of magical realism throughout the last century are linked to the horrifying events that have marred history and raised questions about our humanity. While the Second World War, followed by the looming danger of a nuclear armageddon, significantly accounts for the existentialist anguish that had imbued European letters and thinking in the second half of the twentieth century, magical realist writing―as an expression of the traumatic imagination―offered new

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opportunities, and not alternatives, to work through it. Magical realism also marked the extraordinary boom of Latin American literature in the middle of the twentieth century. Angel Flores suggests the year 1935 as its starting point, when Jorge Luis Borges published his collection Historia universal de la infamia [A Universal History of Infamy] in Buenos Aires (Flores 113): the transatlantic link came about most likely through Borges’ translation into Spanish of Franz Kafka’s short fiction, just a couple of years before the appearance of A Universal History of Infamy. Latin America’s colonial inheritance, brutal military regimes, failed revolutions, and economic disasters have unquestionably served to catapult magical realism into the literary realm and even well beyond the literary productions of the region (to North America, Africa, and Southeast Asia). “Magic realism may be viewed as a response to the horrors of the political situation in much of Latin America,” remarks Ronald Granofsky. However, besides its hypothetical causes, there are generally no concrete indications about the sources of magical realism in different regions and cultures. Jean Weisgerber points out the polygenetic character of magical realism as a literary trend and its relevance to comparatist studies: “It is evident that a phenomenon as widespread as the opposition to traditional realism should apparently prompt authors from different countries to suggest analog or related formula revealing, sometimes imperceptibly, magical realist traits” (“Bilan provisoire” 215, my translation).56 It is such traits which tend to pass unnoticed that I discover in various artistic shock chronotopes, that is, in traumatized time-spaces. My belief in the usefulness of the term relies on an interdisciplinary perspective, which involves psychology and trauma theory and, to a lesser extent, aesthetics and narrative theory. Magical realist writing is the artistic process by which the traumatic imagination transfers to narrative memory events that have eluded memory in the first place: the writing mode does not copy reality but reconstructs it by using all of its familiar elements―only in a somewhat different manner. By bringing apparently incongruous concepts from different discourses under the same hat, interdisciplinary analyses may either become incoherent and

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lose credibility, or, on the contrary, develop comprehensive systems of knowledge applicable to each of the contributing disciplines. By its allinclusive character, magical realism may also transform literary analyses (not only works) into revolutionary acts by undermining the traditional, Eurocentric (or generally Western) modes of discourse. Consequently, as many others, I also see magical realism as postcolonial discourse. However, besides the hegemonic strategies of the colonial Center, magical realist writing also exposes its own failings as a mode of representation. Therefore, the intrinsic versatility of the writing mode necessarily demands more than just one perspective. Rearranging and reinventing reality are processes that Robert Scholes referred to as “fabulation” in his 1979 work Fabulation and Metafiction. Scholes acknowledged that “reality is too subtle for realism to catch it. It cannot be transcribed directly. But by invention, by fabulation, we may open a way toward reality that will come as close to it as human ingenuity may come” (Scholes 14). Just as we use mirrors and maps to reflect the world and to find our way in it, we employ fiction as a complex medium which combines both the reliability of the map and the versatility of the mirror.57 Scholes’s description of fabulation makes it quite easy to recognize the “fabulative” function of magical realism, the way the writing mode corrects the failure of realism to capture reality: magical realist fiction sets the reality of fiction and the fiction in reality side by side, on equal footing, in an attempt to access the real 1) by showing the correspondences between the two ontological levels, and 2) by foregrounding its own failure to ever grasp the real. In Scholes’s argument, “Fabulation means not a turning away from reality, but an attempt to find more subtle correspondences between the reality which is fiction and the fiction which is reality” (Scholes 8). The carnivalesque structure of magical realism is able to create myth―a message and form capable of surviving history―by rearranging the everyday according to the rules of the text, that is, by fabulation. The presence of the supernatural and the extraordinary makes the magical realist writing mode an offshoot of the fantastic genre―which does not mean, however, that every fantastic work can also automatically be

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referred to as magical realist. First, in fantastic narratives, the supernatural intrudes into the known world, and intentionally disrupts the rules of reason, thus prompting the reader to suspend his or her disbelief when entering the text. In magical realist fiction, the supernatural passes for a part of reality, with no need for any explanation whatsoever, most likely because the writer relies more on his or her artistic sense and intuition of reality (a proof of which would be the abundance of sensory details interspersed with poetic language) than on direct observation and judgment. “[In] magical realist works the author does not need to justify the mystery of events, as the fantastic writer has to,” remarks Luis Leal, taking his cue from Alejo Carpentier. “In order to seize reality’s mysteries the magical realist writer heightens his senses until he reaches an extreme state [estado límite (Carpentier’s term)] that allows him to intuit the imperceptible subtleties of the external world, the multifarious world in which we live” (Leal 123). In magical realist texts, the supernatural does not come across as disruptive because the author presents it as unproblematic in the first place. In her work Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved versus Unresolved Antinomy (1985), Amaryll Beatrice Chanady explains this casual acceptance of the supernatural in the magical realist text with the resolution of its antinomic character by both reader and characters: In contrast to the fantastic, the supernatural in magical realism does not disconcert the reader, and this is the fundamental difference between the two modes. The same phenomena that are portrayed as problematical by the author of a fantastic narrative are presented in a matter-of-fact manner by the magical realist. Since the supernatural is not perceived as unacceptable because it is antinomious [sic], the characters and reader do not try to find a natural explanation, as is frequently the case with the fantastic. (24)

Magical realism functions as a submode of the fantastic genre, and both writing modes belong to fantasy literature. The concept that probably most frequently casts doubt on the original meaning of the term magical realism is the “marvelous” as defined by Alejo Carpentier. According to Carpentier, the marvelous “arises

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from an unexpected alteration of reality (the miracle), from a privileged revelation of reality, […] or an amplification of the scale and categories of reality, perceived with particular intensity by virtue of an exaltation of the spirit that leads it to a kind of extreme state [estado límite]” (“Marvelous Real” 86). However, the reality that Carpentier has in mind is exclusively Latin American―a restriction which prompts him to suggest the term lo real maravilloso (the marvelous real) as an alternative to Roh’s magical realism. Carpentier’s description of the marvelous real could, to a certain extent, be viewed as an analysis of magical realism, were it not for his limiting the writing mode to the geo-cultural space of Latin America. For the same reason, it should be noted that Carpentier’s marvelous is not the same as Todorov’s genre of the marvelous. Aside from an extreme state of the spirit [estado límite], Carpentier also describes the marvelous real as a kind of pantheistic presence in the Latin American landscape: “[T]he marvelous real that I defend and that is our own marvelous real is encountered in its raw state, latent and omnipresent, in all that is Latin American. Here the strange is commonplace, and always was commonplace” (“Baroque” 104). Carpentier “defends” the marvelous real so ardently because he perceives the term magical realism as a European invention applicable only to painting and therefore alien to Latin American reality (and fiction): “What [Franz Roh] called magical realism was simply painting where real forms are combined in a way that does not conform to daily reality” (Carpentier, “Baroque” 102). Carpentier’s marvelous could be viewed, in fact, as the privileged aesthetic principle of Latin American geography and literature―as both a double and a rejection of magical realism. Another concept with which magical realism shows certain affinities is the uncanny. Taking his cue from Freud’s analysis of the uncanny in literature, Todorov describes it as a genre (in contrast with the marvelous) before reaching his conclusion that the fantastic is a border genre situated somewhere between the two. After Todorov, critics and theorists have often referred to the uncanny as a mode of writing; for example, David Mikics finds that the uncanny and magical realist writing function

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in a quite similar way, relying on the constant interplay between the strange and the familiar: Magical realism, like the uncanny, a mode with which it has strong affinities, projects a mesmerizing uncertainty suggesting that ordinary life may also be the scene of the extraordinary. […] Both the uncanny and magical realism narrate fantastic events not merely alongside real ones, but as if they were real. What seems most strange turns out to be secretly familiar. (Mikics 372–373)

Thus the simultaneous deployment of the fantastic and the real lies at the origin of both magical realism and the uncanny, and the two key-phrases that describe its effect are “mesmerizing uncertainty” and “dreamlike suspension.” The real becomes uncertain because it looks too much like a dream, but the dream is only too real to be shrugged off as a dream: this would be the world of the uncanny par excellence. “What is then the difference between the uncanny and magical realism itself?” asks Mikics. His answer emphasizes the historical and cultural dimension in both writing modes: “Magical realism is a mode or subset of the uncanny in which the uncanny exposes itself as a historical and cultural phenomenon. Magical realism realizes the conjunction of ordinary and fantastic by focusing on a particular historical moment afflicted or graced by this doubleness” (372–373). In this context, magical realism may be viewed as a rediscovery of the uncanny (or its return, rather) amidst socio-historical circumstances that have once again foregrounded the strange, the mysterious, and the inexplicable in our world. Reality is “contaminated,” as Borges would say, by dreams. * A first trait of magical realism that seems to enjoy relative consensus among critics is the coexistence of two conflicting perspectives on reality: one rational and opposed to the supernatural and the other tolerant of it as part of everyday reality. Although intrinsically antithetical, both perspectives are “autonomously coherent” (Chanady 21–22), meaning that on each ontological level things make sense according to the specific

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rules of each level. As Faris also remarks, “The magical realist vision exists at the intersection of two worlds, at an imaginary point inside a double-sided mirror that reflects in both directions” (Faris 172). On the level of language, this two-directional reflection is realized by two kinds of images. On the one hand, magical realism uses realistic descriptions that “create a fictional world that resembles the one we live in, in many instances by extensive use of detail” (Faris 169), very much in the vein of the realistic tradition. On the other hand, magical realist imagery also appeals to readers by magical, out-of-this-world details which obviously mark a deviation from realism. “The detail is freed, in a sense, from a traditionally mimetic role to a greater extent than it has been before” (Faris 169). Of course, the double-sided-mirror perspective can quite easily become disconcerting to readers, who may find themselves at a loss in deciding on which reflection to focus. Another, somewhat more contentious, characteristic of the magical realist text regards the reader’s reaction to representations of the normal and the paranormal in the text. Chanady, for instance, seems to adopt the traditional position of the “suspension of disbelief” on the reader’s part when entering the world of fiction. According to her, the magical realist author “abolishes the antinomy between the natural and the supernatural on the level of textual representation, and the reader, who recognizes the two conflicting logical codes on the semantic level, suspends his judgment of what is rational and what is irrational in the fictitious world” (26). Conversely, Faris sides with Todorov, whose explanation of the fantastic is based on the reader’s hesitation between the uncanny (in which events are logically explainable) and the marvelous (in which the rules of the natural world are altered) (Faris 171). Even admitting that magical realism is founded on the dual ontological structure of the fantastic, I do not believe that the reader of the magical realist text can afford the same kind of hesitancy that the fantastic requires for its existence. For one thing, the magical realist text shows no clear demarcation between its two ontological levels: the supernatural, the paranormal, and the magical either intrude into the everyday unexpectedly, without any warning from the narrator (foreshadowing) or underlie (and

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sometimes undermine) the “real” reality in a latent manner (inaccurate time references, fake historical figures, distorted scientific theories, etc.). Most of the time, the abundance of sensory details effectively prevent the reader from doubting the veracity of the events, objects, or characters described. Therefore, I agree with Chanady’s point of view but with one slight adjustment: even if readers do recognize the two conflicting semantic codes in the text, they do not need to suspend their judgment of what is rational and irrational; on the contrary, readers need to stay aware of the ambivalent world, the “double-sided mirror,” that they face—a general condition of postmodernist fiction and also a typical indication of its self-reflectivity. Readers must learn to live with Verwirrung innerhalb der Klarheit (“confusion within clarity”), a phrase that Angel Flores borrowed from the Austrian novelist Joseph Roth in a slightly different context (Flores 115–116). A third trait of magical realism is what Chanady calls “authorial reticence or absence of obvious judgments about the veracity of the events and the authenticity of the world view expressed by characters in the text” (30). Thanks to the author’s noncommittal attitude, the rules of the magical realist text remain unchallenged: in such a scenario, magic does happen. Faris refers to the paranormal unquestioned by either author or readers as the ‘irreducible element’ of magic” to be found in all magical realist fiction (167). The magical realist author’s technique is in fact quite simple: all he or she needs to do is to describe both natural and supernatural phenomena in the same way. As a result, the antinomy on the semantic level, mentioned by Chanady in her analysis, is resolved in the act of reading: “it is this resolution of semantic antinomy on the level of focalization [act of reading] which characterizes magical realism” (Chanady 36). The focalizer (reader) only follows the rules laid down by the author. Most likely taking her cue from Chanady, Faris coins the term “defocalization” in order to show that “the [magical realist] narrative is ‘defocalized’ because it seems to come from two radically different perspectives [foci] at once” (Ordinary Enchantments 43). In the final analysis, Faris’s “defocalization” of the narrative comes quite close to what McHale calls the “rhetoric of contrastive banality”: the characters’

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unquestioning of out-of-this-world events (on the textual level) contrasts with the readers’ amazement by them (in the reading act). Any analogy to Chanady’s argument would be only partially valid: on the textual level (reticent author and unquestioning characters), the supernatural is treated matter-of-factly (with banality), so the reader (focalizer) remains unfazed by it–but not in McHale’s opinion, who, on the contrary, sees the readers amazed by it. I would not say that levitating human beings (as in Kundera) or flying paper birds (as in García Márquez) cannot be grounds for amazement, but their appearance in the texts does not so much amaze the readers (as fire-spitting dragons or magic-wand toting fairy godmothers would do, for instance) as unsettles them, briefly disorients them, by inducing feelings of anxiety and fear usually attributed to the effect of the uncanny. On account of its eclecticism and versatility, magical realism could be classified according to different criteria. William Spindler, for instance, has described three categories of magical realism based on the meanings of “magic”: 1. ‘Metaphysical Magic Realism’ [is] a strand of magical realism that introduces a sense of unreality in the reader, an uncanny atmosphere, by describing a scene as if it were something new and unknown, but does not deal explicitly with the supernatural [e.g., Albert Camus, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, William James, and Jorge Luis Borges]. 2. ‘Anthropological Magical Realism’ [is] ‘the survival in popular culture of a magical and mythical Weltanschauung, which coexists with the rational mentality generated by modernity.’ Furthermore, anthropological magic realism ‘gives popular culture and magical beliefs the same degree of importance as Western science and rationality.’ 3. ‘Ontological Magic Realism’ [is] an ‘individual’ form of magic realism where ‘the supernatural is presented in a matterof-fact way as if it did not contradict reason.’ […] The writer exercises total freedom in the creative possibilities of writing [e. g., Julio Cortázar and Kafka]. (cited in Manzanas, “Romance” 55–56)

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Christopher Warnes, on the other hand, distinguishes two types of magical realism based on their responses to causality: 1) faith-based magical realism, which he defines as an “attempt to supplement, extend or overwhelm causality with the terms of participation [term used by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl to characterize “primitive mentality”].” In this type of magical realism, the supernatural “may stand synecdochically or metonymically for an alternative way of conceiving of reality usually derived from a non-Western belief system or world view” (14); and 2) irreverent magical realism, in which “an event or presence, which is not rationalized or explained away, nonetheless stands in place of an idea or a set of ideas, say, about the ways language constructs reality, or about the incapacities of binaristic thinking” (14–15). This latter type of magical realist texts employs the supernatural for the purpose of defamiliarization or estrangement (Shklovsky’s terms), a process that is usually supported by other metaphorical and metafictional devices (16). As its name also suggests, magical realism is not a deviation from realism but a correction, an amendment of it. “[M]agical realism may be considered an extension of realism in its concern with the nature of reality and its representation, at the same time that it resists the basic assumptions of post-enlightenment rationalism and literary realism” (Parkinson Zamora and Faris 6). The resistance of magical realism to the narrative authority that Western literature assigned to realism in the nineteenth century has resulted in the questioning of the realistic mode of representation and in experimenting with new forms of fiction. As an often controversial novelty, the magical realist writing mode has also been alternately labeled as “post-realism,” “postmodern realism,” “magic grotesque,” “psychic realism” or “hallucinated realism.” According to Ana María Manzanas, “what all these ‘-isms’ have in common is an effort to augment the scope of nineteenth-century realism yet retain some of the conventions of its practitioners” (“Mimesis, Realism” 26). Realist literature built its main premise on Aristotle’s notion of mimetic representation, which implied not only a direct relationship between representation and reality but also several additional assumptions, such as: 1) “the world is knowable and therefore susceptible to textual representation”;

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2) “language is an apt means of representation and transcription of facts”; and 3) “the writer is the neutral mediator between words and worlds” (Manzanas, “Mimesis, Realism” 22). The deadly ideologies and the historical catastrophes that came to mar humanity in the twentieth century shattered particularly the last two of the premises of the realist genre: in the aftermath of horror, language found itself emptied of meaning and struggling to find new means of expression; and traumatized writers (directly, vicariously, or transgenerationally) became engaged in the intellectual, social, and political turmoil that had resulted from the collapse of pre-war axiological and ideological systems. Most “tested” values and “evident” truths turned out to be shallow constructions of a civilization blinded with hubris and unaware of its intrinsic hamartia. Consequently, the putative link between realist texts and the world was broken. Unlike realism, “magical realism assumes the indivisible unity of reality and rejects the artificial distinction between what is empirically verifiable and what is not. At the same time, it proposes the existence of another reality that supplements the one we see” (Manzanas, “Romance, the Imaginary” 44). Magical realist writing aligns itself with the general postmodern view that rejects the existence of only one reality and one truth, and constantly exposes its own failure to achieve a thorough and accurate representation of the world. According to Lois Parkinson Zamora, “magical realist texts share (and extend) the tradition of narrative realism: they, too, aim to present a credible version of experienced reality. The crucial difference is that magical realist texts amplify the very conception of ‘experienced reality’ by presenting fictional worlds that are multiple, permeable, transformative, animistic” (500). The magical realist version of “experienced reality” could well be the narrative space of the “ineffable in-between” mentioned by Faris: unlike realism, magical realism does not seek an explainable representation of reality because its founding premise is that reality cannot be explained―or at least not in only one way. The multiplicity of fictional worlds is, after all, an implicit recognition of the variety of reality itself. Never before in the history of literature (or of representation in general) has the nature of the message (represented reality) come so close to the form of the

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medium (text): as most forms of postmodernist fiction, magical realist writing makes of its metafictionality and self-reflectivity a pervasive modus operandi. Another significant difference between realism and magical realism resides in the way they treat fictional illusion: while the former operated on the assumption that readers would suspend their disbelief in the act of reading (based on the premise that the fictional world was an accurate reflection of the real one), the latter expects readers both to acknowledge and to accept the illusion of the fictional world, but without surrendering to its games of deceit, as if it were a supplementation of their experienced reality. As Jesús Benito has recently pointed out, “magical realism struggles to maintain an unambiguous sense of the real, clearly presented, because the full effect of a magical realist text depends on the faithful representation of a reality that admits no doubt―a reality which appears fully credible in the fictional world and upon which the magical elements are seamlessly grafted” (“The Crisis of Representation” 76–77, my emphasis). The complicity of the reader is a sine qua non condition of the magical realist effect. In the mid-1990s, Parkinson Zamora already remarked the textualization of the reader by the magical realist text, the requirement that he or she participate in the making of the fictional illusion: “Whereas conventional narrative realism constructs the illusion of a fictional world that is continuous with the reader’s, magical realism foregrounds the illusionary status of its fictional world by requiring that the reader follow its dislocations and permutations” (501). Consequently, magical realist authors differ, in fact, from their realist predecessors only in their honesty to admit—and in their courage to foreground—the failure of their own narratives to achieve total credibility.58 Aware of the impossibility of total signification, magical realists imbue the reality of their texts with imaginary objects, characters, and events as if to show that, even if it might not be explained, reality can still be experienced. The magical realist text (as offshoot of the fantastic genre) deliberately disorients readers exactly in order to make them more aware of their world and to strengthen their sense of belonging in it. One must understand the magical realist universe not as a flight from

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reality but as a flight simulator, an artificial world within the real world, meant to prepare us for a better grasp of it. By analogy to Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics, Benito describes magical realism as “negative realism” because it “seeks to retain realism while projecting it against itself. […] Negative realism occupies and explores the gap between realistic representation and magical excess, making the two representational ends meet without aiming for any mediation, resolution, or closure” (“A Negative Sense of Reality” 241). Without canceling each other out, magical details are grafted onto realist images, deliberately questioning their reality and opening up the borders of the real. Magical realism never abandons reality; on the contrary, it constantly reveals the contiguous relationship between the everyday and the imaginary―a trait which distinguishes it from another salient, even if short-lived, twentieth-century movement: surrealism. Jean Weisgerber explains the difference by the metonymical nature of magical realism and the metaphorical function of surrealism: Metonymical in nature, magical realism may reveal a necessary relation of contiguity or correspondence between the everyday real and the imaginary, while surrealism would emphasize, similarly to the metaphor, the analogy between these terms in an attempt to realize their fusion […]; magical realism does not rupture the lines that keep it attached to the everyday, beyond which, in fact, would be the place of the surreal. (“Bilan provisoire” 217)59

The magical realist text cannot be read as an allegory either because, instead of substituting one ontological level for the other, it aligns them next to each other; however, in the readers’ minds, their fusion cannot be viewed as always impossible. Yet another trait that differentiates magical realism from its once contemporary trend, surrealism, would be what McHale calls “rhetoric of banality” and Chanady “authorial reticence.” The readers’ unsettlement notwithstanding, magical realist authors treat the supernatural and the natural equally, as if they were both real; in other words, the coexistence of the imaginary and the everyday characterizes the textual level exclusively: it is in the magical realist text only that

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the imaginary becomes part of reality. Weisgerber emphasizes that the intratextual character of the imaginary is what separates magical realism from surrealism as well as from the marvelous and the fantastic: While surrealism unites the poles of the everyday and the imaginary, and the fantastic requires (challenges) one to choose one of the two opposites, magical realism simply keeps showing their simultaneity, without asking for a solution. To this purpose, of course, the imaginary must not be introduced from the outside into the reality of the narrative, in other words, it should be immanent to that reality, which by all means excludes the marvelous and the traditional fantastic. However, once internalized, nothing prevents them from mixing with magical realism. (“Bilan provisoire” 218)60

These distinctions help to understand not just the uniqueness of the magical realist writing mode but also, and maybe more importantly, its affiliations to the other modes, genres, and trends that have shaped the literary landscape of the past century. Part of fantasy literature, closely related to the fantastic, the uncanny, and the marvelous, magical realism reveals the failures and gaps in other artistic attempts to represent reality, and also fills the interstices that have come to separate a culture from its history, or different cultures from each other. From a purely historical point of view, it is impossible to keep magical realism and twentieth-century postmodernism apart from each other: and yet, the controversy over periodization is far from over. From a structural and a thematic perspective, I believe that magical realism in fact facilitates the transition from modernism to postmodernism because it shifts the focus from the omnipotence of language, cherished by the modernists, to the object of representation, the extratextual reality viewed as intrinsically elusive by the postmodernists (who also consider language primarily arbitrary and persistently unreliable). Matters regarding the message and the medium can hardly be analyzed separately in a postmodern context, where representation has become its own object. Therefore, because the real has become increasingly out of reach through the piling of layer over layer of reproductions of reality (simulacra), the task

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of magical realism is actually twofold: first, it attempts to bear witness to the unexplainable, to those blind spots in history which have marred human consciousness and raised questions about our identity and general psychological makeup; and second, it introduces what I have called the language of trauma, the mode of expression of the traumatic imagination, in order to create another kind of hyperreality—not the depthless one that Baudrillard warned against but one that may be felt as if it were experienced for the first time. Some of the essential characteristics of magical realism anchor the writing mode in postmodernism. However, I see in postmodernism more than a mere context, or just a “fertile ground,” facilitating the development of magical realist writing; indeed, magical realism has constituted itself as the richest and most efficient fertilizer of the postmodernist ground. Magical realism both informs the prevailing postmodern attitude toward reality (there is not just one reality but a kaleidoscope of realities) and constitutes at the same time the most successful medium for its signification—hence my adherence to D’haen’s statement, “The cutting edge of postmodernism is magic realism” (201). In the vein of most postmodernist fiction, magical realist writing is metafictional; “the texts provide commentaries on themselves, often complete with occasional mises-en-abyme―those miniature emblematic textual selfportraits” (Faris 175). Moreover, and this would be another postmodernist trait of magical realism, the texts comment not only on themselves but also on literature at large (through frequent intertextual elements), on the social establishment, and on the political canon. Many magical realist authors, such as Kundera and Rushdie, for instance, create what Faris calls a “poetics of subversion, of the non-co-optability of people, events, laughter, love, objects, even images” (179). As a poetics of subversion, the linguistic strategies of magical realism undermine the canon from the inside, masquerading normality in a paranormal context—very much in the manner of a carnivalistic ritual.61 What readers experience in magical realist texts is in fact a linguistic spectacle, a fictional pageant that attempts with every image to conflate the signifier (the word) and the referent (the real). Faris describes

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this verbal magic as “a closing of the gap between words and world, or a demonstration of what we might call the linguistic nature of experience. This magic happens when a metaphor is made real” (176). In other words, when a metaphor is made real, signification seems to circumvent the signified (the concept): the signifier (the word) creates a reality (a referent) experienceable as such in the text only. The phenomenon of verbal magic, or the literalization of the metaphor, has proved to be an especially effective technique for dealing with concrete cases of the artistic shock chronotope: the violent time-space, which could not be conceptualized because of its traumatizing effect, is re-created, or re-presented, in the text and thus rendered directly accessible to the readers’ experience as felt reality—unreal but true. Making her case for the postmodern character of magical realist fiction, Faris states that “[l]inguistic magic celebrates the solidity of invention and takes us beyond representation conceived primarily as mimesis to re-presentation” (Ordinary Enchantments 115). In magical realist texts, as in most postmodernist fiction, words create rather than reflect reality: the constructed reality, however, is never entirely new, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the one readers already know. The magical realist universe does not seem familiar because it is any way identical with the readers’, but because its extraordinary elements are presented in a deceptively matter-of-fact way―a diversionary tactic which ultimately prompts readers to accept them as parts of their rational universe. “Magic is no longer quixotic madness, but normative and normalizing. It is a simple matter of the most complicated sort” (Parkinson Zamora and Faris 3). While the supernatural is presented in ordinary ways, the opposite is often also true: the familiar is endowed with supernatural dimensions. Simpkins recognizes in this narrative strategy what the Russian Formalists called “defamiliarization”: an ordinary element of reality that has lost visibility because of its familiarity is thus restored by an “unrealistic” text. As a result, “[t]hrough a process of supplemental illusions, these textual strategies seem to produce a more realistic text” (Simpkins 150). What familiarity takes away from things and magic gives back is, to use Roh’s formulation, the mystery that “palpitates” behind them.

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The magical realist aesthetic experience privileges experience over knowledge; consequently, its elusiveness notwithstanding, reality can be perceived, lived, and relived over and over again, in all its freshness, each time as if it were for the first time. Its perception resembles a child’s awe and wonder at discovering the world around him. “The narrative appears to the late-twentieth-century adult readers to which it is addressed as fresh, childlike, even primitive. Wonders are recounted largely without comment, in a matter-of-fact way, accepted―presumably―as a child would accept them, without undue questioning or reflection” (Faris 177). The naïve tone of the writing is, of course, intentional. However, besides author and/or narrator, the same tone is also used by the characters in the narrative. Referring to the world of fantasy, John H. Timmerman states that “[t] he common character is naïve in the sense of not having become cynical, hard-bitten, or spoiled by the world about him. He retains the child-like trait of wonder, the willingness to engage adventure” (30). Indeed, many of the main characters or narrators of magical realist texts are children or immature (retarded) adults: after all, it is they who can, better than anyone else, experience reality without letting reason get in the way. Although built on the imaginary, the magical realist world seems to have on its readers exactly the opposite effect to the one Disneyland, for example, has on its visitors. Certainly, both media promise to unveil the real by foregrounding the imaginary. However, only magical realism delivers: through its narrative strategies, it produces texts even more realistic than realism ever created. And even though it engages in a process of simulation, its hyperreality is not the same as the depthless hyperreal (reality of simulacra) in Baudrillard’s social scrutiny. Disneyland falls short of its promise because [it] is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle. (Simulacra and Simulation 12–13)

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In other words, what is shown as artifice in order to contrast the surrounding real amounts in fact to nothing more than willful deception: in fact, the artifice comes to hide the fact that reality has all but disappeared and been replaced by a hyperreal.62 The contrastive perspective clearly shows what magical realism is not. In the final analysis, as it usually happens with literature, it is the test of time and of the readers that will have the final word on the value of any given text and not so much the critics―although the latter’s ability to steer public opinion cannot be underestimated either. Particularly in postmodernist fiction, the reader’s involvement in the production of the text is crucial. However, the reader’s function is usually not limited only to rewriting or actualizing the text: it often also extends to an involvement in the text. The textualization of the reader is yet another hallmark of postmodernist fiction in general and magical realism in particular. Jon Thiem sees “this magical realist topos [textualization] as one of the most important narrative expressions of postmodern literary theory” (240). In Thiem’s argument, textualization as much as annuls the reader’s detachment from the literary text: The world of the text loses its literal impenetrability. The reader loses that minimal detachment that keeps him or her out of the world of the text. The reader, in short, ceases to be reader, ceases to be invulnerable, comfortable in his or her armchair, and safely detached, and becomes instead an actor, an agent in the fictional world. [T]his condition poses a serious threat not only to the reader’s pleasure and the integrity of the text read, but also to the reader himself.” (Thiem 239)

Probably even more than rewriting a text in one’s imagination, acting in it by virtue of the imagination may lead to experiences prone to unsettle the reader’s emotional stability and sense of identity―so the serious threat mentioned by Thiem involves, in certain cases, the possibility of vicarious traumatization. Empathy is essential to both the production (writing) and the reception (rewriting and reliving) of the magical realist text. The subversive

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character of its language also makes it a political instrument meant to undermine the ruling canon. In Parkinson Zamora’s opinion, “That the most counterrealistic contemporary fiction is also the most political results […] in large part from the magical realist insistence upon the universality of the subject. By elaborating for the self a transhistorical context, magical realists give added weight to their dramatizations of specific historical abuses” (504). Magic is used in texts belonging to different authors from different geo-cultural spaces to help readers re-experience (not necessarily understand) some of the worst historical atrocities of the past. Many writers in various cultures have used magical realism, so that one needs to consider its cultural functions, too. I personally experienced Communism for as long as three decades. Therefore, I can only confirm the paradox once pointed out by Žižek: “in order really to forget an event, we must first summon up the strength to remember it properly. [W]e should bear in mind that the opposite of existence is not nonexistence, but insistence: that which does not exist, continues to insist, striving towards existence.” (Desert of the Real 22). By writing pain, magical realist texts do just that: they bring traumatic memories into existence through both their authors’ and their readers’ imagination. ***

CHAPTER 4

“WHO AM I AND WHERE IS MY COUNTRY AND WHERE DO I BELONG?” SURVIVING SLAVERY

Although addressed to a nameless alter ego of Charlotte Brontë’s character Rochester, Antoinette Cosway’s questions in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) sound rhetorical, giving away the underlying tension of a painful search for identity. Antoinette’s constant state of anguish, which marks the tone of the entire novel, will eventually lead to her psychological undoing and finally to suicide. The trauma caused by an elusive sense of identity―in its turn the result of a violent historical loss of origin and almost two centuries of forced silence―is the cultural marker of most Caribbean literary characters born in the chronotope of slavery and a putative sign of postmodern aporia. In Rhys’s traumatic narrative, just as in Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World (1949) and in Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1986),

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the main characters, Antoinette the white Creole, Ti Noël the former slave, and Tituba the maroon outcast, all share the trauma of an absent past (structural trauma) and a painful search for their individual and collective identities. While their stories end in death―self-inflicted, peacefully assumed, or violent―their histories live on because their narratives ultimately confer on them the identities that they passionately longed for but were brutally denied in their lifetimes. In a post-slavery Caribbean, postmodernist writing reclaims disavowed pasts and rebuilds histories marred by the violence and horrors of slavery. Given the authors’ temporal distance from the violent historical events that they felt compelled to recover and re-create through their narratives, the shock chronotope of slavery comes to life as a simulation rather than as a representation of real events. Twentieth-century Caribbean authors transfer already signified events (by historical documents and/or other authors’ writings) into their work by artistic images based on linguistic hybrids, that is, on both their own language and that of the represented. The resulting fictional world―the magical realist hyperreal―is in fact a felt reality, an affective simulacrum, as opposed to Baudrillard’s depthless reproduction of other reproductions. Besides the temporal remoteness of the original events, the struggle to bring to life voices deprived of their past and silenced by trauma has constantly challenged most Caribbean writers. For more than half a century, Caribbean writers have been “writing their world into existence” (Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse), defining the cultural identity of the geographical space in which they were born, which most of them left in their youths, and to which they never ceased to return later in their lives. By their own testimonies, discovering a long-forbidden Caribbean identity has proved to be a daunting task not only because of a violent history but also because of the inherently elusive character of the original referent. The leaving behind and subsequent inaccessibility and erasure of the black slaves’ African cultural identity, as well as the almost complete physical erasure of the indigenous populations that preceded them, has rendered the constitution of a Caribbean national identity impossible―if one considers, of course, the term “nation” in its European sense, broadly defined as a

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community sharing the same historical territory, language, religion, customs, and traditions. Caribbean landscape and history, as well as ethnical, social, and political identities could be reclaimed only through writing, and more specifically, through a language capable of presenting the unpresentable, of documenting a reality either too beautiful or too terrifying―or, at times, mysteriously both―to be reflected in a traditional, “realistic” type of narrative. Consequently, the literature of the region bears the mark of its insularity, both geographical and historical, and the intrinsic tension between an imposed and a desired identity. In his Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant mentions the absence of a foundational past (as opposed to the Caribbean’s oral, ongoing history of the present), which constitutes a perpetual source of structural trauma originating in the oppressive history of “Western civilization” (an arbitrarily emblematic phrase assumed to encompass all derivative cultures born after and west of Mesopotamia). Even though uprootedness and the search for identity have become constant themes in Caribbean writing, they are not as antithetical as one might think. “Uprooting can work toward identity, and exile can be seen as beneficial,” writes Glissant (Poetics of Relation 18). In his view, exile may turn into something different from a physical or mental displacement involving estrangement, alienation, or doubling as soon as it comes to involve another, more random, kind of movement―errantry. “The thought of errantry is a poetics, which always infers that at some moment it is told,” explains Glissant. “The tale of errantry is the tale of Relation” (Poetics of Relation 18). Glissant’s concept of “Relation,” by his own admission, is an offshoot of Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizome.” A rhizomatic identity has no beginning and no end, is not part of any stable system, and exists only “in relation” with other identities, in the absence of any hierarchy, in a field of crisscrossing references. Its instability is always compensated by its basic ability to change constantly and to enter into new relations with new identities. To say that the insular-oceanic landscape plays a pivotal role in formulating and understanding Caribbean identity is more than just a figure of speech―it is an unequivocally anti-essentialist statement: the Caribbean is a living phenomenon, not a fixed, well-defined structure.

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“The culture of the Caribbean, at least in its most distinctive aspects, is not terrestrial but aquatic, a sinuous culture where time unfolds irregularly and resists being captured by the cycles of clock and calendar,” writes Benítez-Rojo. “It is, in the final analysis, a culture of the metaarchipelago: a chaos that returns, a detour without a purpose, a continual flow of paradoxes; it is a feed-back machine with asymmetrical workings…” (11). In this culture, errantry means both living in relation and telling about life in relation at the same time. The problem with representing or even reconstructing Caribbean reality lies with its inherently eccentric, constantly fluid, and disconcertingly chaotic repertoire of realemes―a system of signification made up of signified things (as opposed to the real world of things-in-themselves).63 A repertoire of realemes can also be understood as a system of concepts different from the world of constructs (the felt, acknowledged, but non-conceptualized referents of the real)―with the only distinction that realemes are culture-, space-, and time-specific, a characteristic that theoretically places them in the same category with the building stones of the Bakhtinian chronotope: “Judgments of admissibility and inadmissibility are culture-bound, not universal; realemes which one culture permits in its texts, another culture may exclude from the same textclass” (McHale 86). From a larger historical perspective, the Caribbean repertoire of realemes has just begun being written; however, unlike the hegemonic realemes of the “West,” the Caribbean chronotope is being written in relation (Glissant)―as a gigantic rhizome with no single origin (apocryphal), no center (eccentric), and no defining (non-circumscriptive) hierarchy of values. Caribbean writing, and particularly its magical realist mode, has broken away from traditional historical fiction, and can be said to have led to the rise and eventual spreading of postmodernist revisionist fiction. Traditional historical fiction allows for the insertion of realemeshistorical figures, events, places, objects, and so forth―only as long as they match the hegemonic “official” historical record. Moreover, time-specific reference cannot be used anachronistically: realemes also need to conform to the “official” version of history. However, the

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most widespread constraint on the introduction of historical realemes, according to McHale, is that “the logic and physics of the fictional world must be compatible with those of reality […] otherwise, the text will be at radical variance with the norms of ‘classic’ historical fiction. […] Or, to put it differently, historical fictions must be realistic fictions; a fantastic historical fiction is an anomaly” (McHale 88). Conversely, postmodernist revisionist fiction uses mostly the techniques that were formerly foreclosed by the rules of traditional historical fiction: questionable historical references (“apocryphal history”); scrambled chronology of events (“creative anachronism”); and unreal or supernatural objects (“historical fantasy”). “Apocryphal history, creative anachronism, historical fantasy—these are the typical strategies of the postmodernist revisionist historical novel” (McHale 90). Carpentier’s and Condé’s novels attempt to rewrite the historical record of the chronotope of slavery; however, they do not replace it with a fictional version but add more reality―felt reality―to it by contrasting the rhetoric of historical works with the artistic reconstruction of the same historical realemes. Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea stands out as a plausible transplant of the artistic chronotope of post-slavery into a text of the metropolitan center; in an intertextual, Rhys does not so much rewrite as supplements a “classical” text with a possible prequel of one of its characters’ life, proving that trauma can be not only transgenerational but also transcultural. As truthful, fascinating, or even shocking as they might be, facts, statistics, and numbers cannot produce the same kind of affects, if any, as events reconstructed through artistic images can. Stalin allegedly once said that the death of a man is a tragedy, and the death of a million men a statistic. Easy to understand, numbers cannot be felt—which could explain why a synecdoche (e.g., the story of an individual) is likely to leave a deeper and more lasting impression than the whole (e.g., the historical event) it stands for. Historical records are texts intended to encompass a whole picture (a chronotope) and to order the events in it in an intelligible fashion; therefore, the result is more often than not a depthless, demystified, and even dehumanized narrative. The “truth” is that

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people live, fight, and die for goals and for reasons that are rarely clear, logical, or unambiguous: it is ultimately what makes them human. * Neither of the two novels, The Kingdom of this World or I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, was written by a slave―if I may state the obvious; however, both works project harrowing images of the violence, pain, and suffering involved in being a slave. Neither Carpentier, nor Condé, nor their readers might possibly know what it felt like being a slave; the closest feeling they and I might experience is empathy, or to use LaCapra’s term, empathic unsettlement. Consequently, what is it then that makes one pay attention to Carpentier’s third-person and Condé’s first-person narrators as if they were primary witnesses to the atrocities of the colonial slaveholders? On what grounds may one invest their voices with the authority due exclusively to the victims of historical violence? A native of the Caribbean, born in Cuba, Carpentier first became interested in Latin America after 1928, while living in France. According to his own admission, I felt an ardent desire to express the [Latin] American world. I still did not know how. I was attracted by the difficulty of the task because of lack of knowledge of American essences. I devoted myself for long years to reading everything I could about America, from the letters of Christopher Columbus through the Inca Garcilaso to the eighteenth century authors. For the space of eight years I don’t think I did anything except read [Latin] American texts. (Shaw 15)

It is important to note that the desire to “express” the Latin American reality preceded the author’s ability to do so; only after reading Latin American texts, in the largest sense of the word (historical records as well as personal and literary writings), did he gain the historical perspective necessary to create a fictional, felt reality of the region. Given the violent history of the region, the texts did presumably more than just providing Carpentier with factual knowledge: they must also have made a significant emotional impact on the author’s consciousness.

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Eight years of intensive and focused readings of Latin American history may hardly qualify as a simply informative experience; therefore, one may safely assume that the artist’s sensibility and inclination to empathy have rendered him particularly vulnerable to some degree of vicarious traumatization. The likelihood of truth that Carpentier may have found in Columbus’s letters or in the writings of eighteenth-century authors could be attributed, at best, to the implied authority of the sources, viewed either 1) as testimonies of primary witnesses of the events described, recorded, or represented, or 2) as accounts of secondary witnesses who lived closer to the time of their occurrence than Carpentier himself. Accordingly, the feeling of an eighteenth-century event recollected by someone through narrative memory could quite literally―and literarily, through the work of imagination―be translated64 two centuries later into images closely resembling the “original”; it is not so much the empirical details of the referent, or one’s closeness in time to it, that count as much asthe relevance and the feeling that one has invested in it. Therefore, one may safely assume that Columbus’s perspective and the voices of eighteenthcentury authors have come to find in Carpentier’s text a new medium of re-presentation. The history of the referent itself has not been distorted in any way: the palimpsest of historical writing has only added yet another layer of re-presentation. In this sense, the referent of Carpentier’s text is not the real-life chronotope of slavery―even if the reader is made to feel it as if it were―but an already narrativized (recorded, signified) version of that chronotope. In fact, the referent of The Kingdom of this World is another representation of the chronotope of slavery, that is, another signified: it follows that the artistic chronotope of slavery around which the novel is fleshed out is but a simulacrum of the real-life chronotope. Magical realism rewrites historical reality by adding mystery and feeling to it―in brief, it creates a hyperreality with depth, which, unlike Baudrillard’s oversaturated hyperreal, penetrates the real in a continuously repeated attempt to bring reality closer to us. As McHale also remarks, “In postmodernist revisionist historical fiction, history and fiction exchange places, history becoming fictional and fiction becoming

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‘true’ history―and the real world seems to get lost in the shuffle. But of course this is precisely the question postmodernist fiction is designed to raise: real, compared to what?” (96). The turning point in Carpentier’s stylistic outlook and the inception of The Kingdom of this World go back to his 1943 visit to Haiti, to the “poetic” ruins of Henri Christophe’s fortresses and General Leclerc’s palace. It was here that the author first experienced the epiphany of the marvelous real: My first inkling of the marvelous real [lo real maravilloso] came to me when, near the end of 1943, I was lucky enough to visit Henri Christophe’s kingdom―such poetic ruins, Sans-Souci and the bulk of the Citadel of La Ferrière, imposingly intact in spite of lightning and earthquakes; and I saw the still-Norman Cape Town, the Cap Français of the former colony, where a house with great long balconies leads to the palace of hewn stone inhabited years ago by Pauline Bonaparte. My encounter with Pauline Bonaparte there, so far from Corsica, was a revelation to me. I saw the possibility of establishing certain synchronisms, American, recurrent, timeless, relating this to that, yesterday to today. (“Marvelous Real” 84)

The marvelous real―Carpentier’s way of rejecting European magical realism while in fact describing its Caribbean version―is said to originate in the conflation of distant geographical spaces and historical times. Europe and the Caribbean, as well as the twentieth and the eighteenth centuries, all meet as a complex, live rhizomatic structure in the author’s senses: this is the basic perception of Caribbean reality so magically and yet truthfully conveyed in The Kingdom of this World. In the postmodern era, truth has ceased to be the exclusive privilege of the official canon simply because now “fiction, even fantastic or apocryphal or anachronistic fiction, can compete with the official record as a vehicle of historical truth” (McHale 96). To historical “truth” belongs the fact that, in the second half of the eighteenth century, there was a real-life person called Lenormand de Mézy, slaveholder and owner of a sugarcane plantation, who lived on

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the island of Saint Domingue. The slave conspiracy of 1757, led by François Makandal (also spelled as Mackandal by others, or as Macandal in The Kingdom of this World), and the full-blown revolt that followed forty years later also fall in the category of historical facts. Interested more in the victims’ point of view than in the perpetrators’, Carpentier rewrites history through the voice of a detached third-person narrator using the point of view of Ti Noël, a slave groom on Lenormand de Mézy’s plantation in the opening chapters of the novel. Ti Noël’s view of the events combines the awareness of a remote African past (reactualized by Macandal’s fantastic stories) and the painful experiences of the narrative present. Analyzing elements of myth and history in Caribbean fiction, Barbara J. Webb notes that “Through the consciousness of Ti Noel, Carpentier merges the mythic and historical cycles of the novel. Thus the folk imagination (the oral traditions and religious beliefs of the Haitian slaves) is the vehicle for the author’s experiments with space and time in the narrative” (Webb 28). However, Carpentier’s attempts at stylistic innovation should not be regarded as gratuitous literary experiments in the spirit of ars gratia artis, or the Haitian folk imagination as an ingredient meant to spice up the narrative. An empathic audience ought to perceive the author’s text and its inclusion of (and reliance on) the slaves’ oral stories (Macandal’s in particular) as an expression of both historical trauma and trauma as history; in The Kingdom of this World, trauma becomes a trope by which an eighteenth-century shock chronotope is repeated, reconstructed, and turned anew into an affect now targeting twentieth-century sensibilities.65 In Webb’s point of view, “Mackandal’s stories of Africa are intended to negate the idea of a cultural void as the necessary legacy of slavery―a prevalent theme in discussions of Caribbean history and culture. These stories are more than nostalgic evocations of the glories of the African past since through them Mackandal perpetuates historical memory and the quest for freedom” (Webb 29). Macandal’s stories are more than mere accounts of events remembered, heard about, or imagined: through the artistic way in which they are delivered, the Haitian slave’s tales become magical reenactments of history.

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In several instances in the narrative, the narrator describes Macandal’s storytelling as theatrical performances by using the main characterTi Noël’s point of view: “With deliberately languid tone, the better to secure certain effects, the Mandingue Negro [Macandal] would tell of things that had happened in the great kingdom of Popo…” (13); “His narrative arts, when, with terrible gestures, he played the part of different personages, held the men spellbound, especially when he recalled his trip, years earlier, as a prisoner before the was sold as a slave to the slave-traders of Sierra Leone” (19); and finally, after he runs away, the world he has created vanishes, too: “The disappearance of Macandal was also the disappearance of all that world evoked by his tales” (29). Likewise, Carpentier’s narrative creates a universe of its own, in which the characters either play the roles of their real historical selves, that is, the roles of historical realemes, or create synecdochic versions of other real-life persons involved in historical events. Thus, the reader comes to re-create a text that re-creates a character that re-creates a past lost in the fogs of time: the postmodernist “mise-en-abyme” par excellence. The present lines do little more than scratch the surface of the palimpsest: my analysis can only encompass the text at hand, Carpentier’s novel, and a few contextual historical references. However, the real events will forever remain inaccessible for at least two reasons: first, because their brutality prevented them from being processed by reason and recorded by memory at the time of their occurrence; and second, because the victims were deprived of a voice through which to bear witness to violence and of an audience willing to listen to their stories. This is the silence that perpetuates trauma, its continual return, and its insistence to be turned into reality; it is also the silence that magical realism, as an expression of the traumatic imagination, attempts to write. Unlike postmodernist historical fiction (McHale’s term), official historical texts are factual in content and terse in form. For instance, in The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below, Carolyn E. Fick writes that “the conspiracy of 1757, as well as the revolt of 1791, which dramatically opened the black revolution, occurred within a context substantially different from that of the earlier revolts. The revolt that was planned by Makandal in the North, and which subsequently

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was to have spread to ‘all corners of the colony,’ was both conceived and organized in marronage”66 (Fick 49). By comparison, Carpentier’s novel presents the same events, Macandal’s conspiracy of 1757 and Bouckman’s revolt of 1791, extending over twelve chapters and without any mention of historical dates. Is the historical text too impersonal to make an impact on the audience’s consciousness? Or is postmodernist historical fiction too inaccurate to impart truthful knowledge on the readers? As in most cases, the answer lies somewhere in between: it depends on an audience’s power of imagination to invest facts with affects, just as it is up to the readers’ intellect to filter through fictional images and re-create historical truth―or whatever comes closest to it. The fact that the historian’s account is not free of doubts and speculations only confirms its status as “text,” as a narrative meant to make sense of the bits and pieces of information and/or material evidence available to its author, and to create a story plausible enough to pass as “factual,” “objective,” and “true” in the mind of the audience. Carolyn Fick’s biography of the “real” Macandal (the historical realeme), for instance, draws on historical data of the time: According to a contemporary source, [François Makandal] was born in ‘Guinea’ into an illustrious family that undertook his education at a very early age. He was supposedly brought up in the Moslem religion and apparently had an excellent command of Arabic. As a young man he possessed a remarkably inquisitive mind and, introduced to the arts, displayed a keen interest in music, painting, and sculpture, while having acquired a considerable knowledge of tropical medicine, despite his young age. Very little else is known about his background, for at the age of twelve he was captured as a prisoner of war, sold as a common slave to the European traders, and shipped to Saint Domingue. Here he was sold again, this time to Lenormand de Mézy in the district of Limbé, whose plantations were among the largest and wealthiest in the North. (Fick 59–60)

Besides generally clear statements, the rhetoric also shows some traces of incertitude: occasional words and phrases, such as “supposedly,”

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“apparently,” and “very little else is known,” reveal the limits of the historian’s knowledge of events that preceded her by two hundred years, and undermine the implied authority of her voice. In The Kingdom of this World, the reader finds Macandal already working on Lenormand de Mézy’s plantation, pushing sheaves of sugar cane between the iron rollers of a mill turned around by a horse. When one day the horse stumbles, it causes an accident that will change the course of history. The accident that maims Macandal and ultimately turns him into a fugitive is described in horrifying detail: “There came a howl so piercing and so prolonged that it reached the neighboring plantations, frightening the pigeons. Macandal’s left hand had been caught with the cane by the sudden tug of the rollers, which had dragged in his arm up to the shoulder. An eye of blood began to widen in the pan catching the juice” (21). The minute sensory details (mostly visual and auditory), such as the piercing howl, the frightened pigeons, and the widening pool of blood, are meant to create a powerful image in the readers’ minds by making them feel the violence that shaped the character of a historical figure. Exaggerations, such as the howl reaching the neighboring plantations, far from corroding the plausibility of the events, endow reality with that felt―and sometimes traumatizing―dimension that the terse historical rhetoric or a traditionally realistic narrative could hardly convey, if at all. By comparison, the historian’s account of the same event reads as follows: “Makandal turned fugitive after his hand was amputated, having caught it in the machinery of the sugar mill while working the night shift” (Fick 60). Moreover, the historian lacks the fiction writer’s latitude in choosing only one version of an event, or his freedom to randomly combine different versions of the same event, or his imagination to fill in the blanks of a historical account with made-up realemes or to substitute historical realemes with fake ones. Therefore, the historian simply adds another account of the same event, without worrying about changing the dynamics of the whole story, as a fiction writer would: Another [source], however, attributes [Macandal’s] marronage to the consequences of a dispute between himself and his master

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over a young and beautiful Negress. Apparently Makandal’s master had, out of vengeance, ordered him to receive fifty lashes of the whip, whereupon Makandal refused this humiliation and precipitously took to the woods. Here he began his long and notorious career, one that spanned nearly eighteen years, as a preRevolutionary maroon leader. (Fick 60)

And the rest is history. However, the act of signification in a historical account will never be able to convey the shock value of a shock chronotope―in this case, of slavery. It takes the fiction writer’s traumatic imagination to evoke the pain and suffering inflicted by the horrors of a shock chronotope. The fifty lashes of the whip mentioned in the historical text must have caused a lot more physical and psychological damage than just humiliation and a sudden decision to run to the woods: even if fifty whiplashes may offer a plausible explanation for the making of a maroon rebel and the beginnings of the slaves’ fight against their oppressors, their simple mentioning will never convey the anger and the despair that could make readers two centuries later feel the rebel’s humanity and to empathize with his plight. The theme of the maroons and the phenomenon of marronage are based on a quite controversial historical record. Thus, “for Carpentier the maroon rebel is a direct link to the African past, and as such preserves the mythologies that the Haitian slaves use to challenge the ‘outer frame’ of history in concrete political ways” (Webb 158). Conversely, other accounts mention maroons as collaborators with the slave owners. In a pre-emancipation Jamaican context, Henry Bleby wrote that “The Maroons, also, were employed to hunt the [slave] fugitives; and how many were brutally slaughtered by these demi-savages, never has been known, and never will be, till the sea and the earth shall give up their dead” (Bleby 22). Whether victims or perpetrators of violence, maroons seem always to have been linked to a history of atrocities, starting with the first maroon community, established in the eastern Bahoruco mountains, not by African slaves but “the last survivors of the indigenous Arawaks, brutally massacred, enslaved, and finally exterminated under the genocidal practices of the Spanish” (Fick 51).67 The beginnings of

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historical trauma in the Caribbean date back well before the arrival of the black slaves: the first writings on the palimpsest are much older than one might expect. Within the next century and a half, the phenomenon of marronage became a significant threat to the security of the slaveholders and, more generally, to the very stability of the institution of slavery. Therefore, all further repressive, retaliatory, and punitive measures had to be laid down in a written law―just another word for the oppressors’ placebo for any eventual pangs of conscience. The Black Code of 1685 forbade slaves from different plantations to assemble under any circumstances (including celebrations), “under punishment of the whip or the burning brand of the fleur de lys. For those who persisted, it could mean death” (Fick 52). Furthermore, leaving the plantation required a written pass from the owner, and carrying anything that could be as much as suspected as a weapon of some kind was strictly forbidden. Physical punishments were meant either to inflict extreme pain (and often permanent maiming) or to cause death: “A fugitive slave in flight up to one month from the date of his reported escape would have his ears cut off and the fleur de lys branded on one shoulder. […] After that, the punishment was death” (Fick 53). The law also allowed slave owners to “shoot on sight any slave they believed to be a fugitive, a provision that incidentally caused innocent slaves mistaken for fugitives to be recklessly killed” (Fick 53). The historian’s account abounds with instances of extreme violence, which may certainly have a significant impact on readers’ consciousness in spite of the bare style and rhetoric―but will never produce affects as profound as the ones historical fiction and particularly magical realism are capable of creating. Evidently, all these excerpts speak of deeply traumatic events, and yet the voice that recounts them (temporally distanced and emotionally detached) fails to render, or, rather, to re-create the tremendous amount of human pain and suffering involved in them. The historian’s impersonal voice need not necessarily indicate a deficit in empathy: it needs to be viewed, rather, as the inevitable outcome of an attempt to create a photographic―and therefore presumably objectiveimage of a past reality. Only the past cannot be photographed: it needs to

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be imagined. Remembering is an act of imagination, while remembering a shock chronotope requires the work of the traumatic imagination, whose psychological outlet and artistic expression is the magical realist image. Balancing the magical element with the realistic detail accounts for the delicate nature of the creative process involved in magical realist writing. When Ti Noël mentally compares four wax heads with curled wigs lying on the counter of a barber’s shop with the skinned calves’ heads in the window of a tripe-shop next door in the first chapter of The Kingdom of this World, the narrator calls the scene “an amusing coincidence” (10). However, the amusement quickly fades when the reader is told that “it amused Ti Noël to think that alongside the pale calves’ heads, heads of white men were served on the same tablecloth” (11); almost imperceptibly, the tone turns from ludicrous to lugubrious, and racial tension (“white men”), smoldering hatred (“served” to be eaten), and an ominously aggressive stance surface from the otherwise static scene. Similarly, when Macandal is lying in a pasture and foraging through a variety of grasses, the minute description of the different plants and weeds leads the reader to assumptions that go beyond the surface of the pastoral scene: “To his surprise he discovered the secret life of a strange species given to disguise, confusion, and camouflage, protectors of the little armored beings that avoid the pathways of the ants” (23). The allegory is evident: the “strange species” signifies the black race whose survival literally depends on its invisibility. While there is no direct magical intrusion in these scenes, the two ontological planes of the text, the natural and the supernatural, come dangerously close to each other, threatening to collapse the thin lines of demarcation. The feeling of uncanniness in these images tends to induce an “extreme state” in the reader’s mind and soul, an estado límite in which Carpentier saw the source of the marvelous real: [T]he marvelous begins to be unmistakably marvelous when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality (the miracle), from a privileged revelation of reality, an unaccustomed insight that

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The clinical rhetoric is not accidental: the intensity of one’s perception of reality stems, indeed, from a state out of bounds (ex-tremus) that characterizes, in my view, the traumatic imagination, whereas the “cure” to a consciousness overwhelmed by a reality of either extreme beauty or extreme pain, or both, can only come from an acknowledgment of and a surrendering to its magic—to that intrinsic and terrifying dimension that makes reality often inaccessible to reason. In order to break a spell, one needs to believe in spells in the first place. Ti Noël learns from Macandal to submit to the power of magic. Because the narrative unfolds from his point of view, readers actually become complicit with his initiation and learn to take the magic in everyday reality in their stride. The following extraordinary scene takes place in a witch’s house: In response to some mysterious order, [Maman Loi] ran to the kitchen, sinking her arms in a pot full of boiling oil. Ti Noël observed that her face reflected an unruffled indifference, andwhich was stranger―that when she took her arms from the oil they showed no sign of blister or burn, despite the horrible sputter of frying he had heard a moment before. As Macandal seemed to accept this with complete calm, Ti Noël did his best to hide his amazement. (25–26)

In this situation, readers, along with Ti Noël, the character through whose eyes they experience the story, are outsiders. Just as he, they might also feel inclined to bypass their amazement and to accept, instead, the unexplainable as a legitimate part of reality. On the other hand, Maman Loi and Macandal are insiders: to them, boiling oil is not a source of pain,

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and does not pose a threat to one’s body. However, the intrusion of magic into the everyday is not gratuitous: in light of the atrocities to follow later in the narrative, one needs to be prepared to take pain―inflicted by violent means―as part of a re-presented reality, that is, the simulacrum of a reality that would normally resist any kind of narrativization. If imagination compensates for the objectlessness of pain (Scarry 161–162), it becomes easier to understand why magical realism can simulate pain in literary images in spite of their traumatic nature. And in case the mind fails to adjust to the continuous presence of a shocking reality, it is up to the body to escape its vulnerability by changing its configuration from human to faunal. Instances of metamorphosis abound in The Kingdom of this World. In magical realist imagery, the boundary between the two ontological levels of the text can be transcended in one direction or another, so metamorphoses are quite common phenomena, “they embody in the realm of organisms a collision of two different worlds” (Faris 178). After his marronage, Macandal revisits the plantations in different animal forms, just as Ti Noël will at the end of the novel. However, the intrusion of the supernatural varies in the two cases of anthropomorphism: Ti Noël’s metamorphoses are sudden, intentional, and meant as experiments in different bodily existences in order to show than anything is, after all, better than being a former slave: “He climbed a tree, willed himself to become a bird, and instantly was a bird. […] The next day he willed himself to be a stallion, and he was a stallion […]. He turned himself into a wasp, but he soon tired of the monotonous geometry of wax constructions” (178). Eventually, Ti Noël comes to realize that all his powers are futile, and that none of the alternative corporeal existences can offer him the refuge he has so desperately been seeking. Conversely, in Macandal’s case, the metamorphoses are introduced more subtly, at first being only suggested through a few idiosyncratic phenomena that the slaves attribute to his powers: At night in their quarters and cabins the Negroes communicated to one another, with great rejoicing, the greatest news: a green

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The first-person collective narrator presents all these phenomena, the “greatest news,” as unusual only in the eyes of the slaves. The magic sneaks into the reality of the text and finally finds its sanction in the sentence opening with “They all knew”: what used to look unusual has now come to be known as fact. Macandal’s metamorphoses find their validation once again right before his capture, when he appears at the festival organized at the Dufrené plantation (he is betrayed by one of the slaves). His description here resembles that of a composite mythical being in the tradition of chimeras, gryphons, or, considering his extraordinary manliness, satyrs: “Something of his sojourns in mysterious places seemed to cling to him, something of his successive attires of scales, bristles, fur. His chin has taken on a feline sharpness, and his eyes seemed to slant a little toward his temples, like those of certain birds whose appearance he had assumed” (47). His transformations, unlike Ti Noël’s in the end of the novel, seem to serve at least three purposes. First, they make up for his physical impairment (the loss of an arm in a work accident on the Lenormand de Mézy plantation): “In his cycle of metamorphoses, Macandal had often entered the mysterious world of the insects, making up for the lack of his human arm with the possession of several feet, four wings, or long antennae. He had been fly, centipede, moth, ant, tarantula, ladybug, even a glow-worm with phosphorescent green lights” (50). Second, his metamorphoses confer on him the invisibility he used to admire in the “secret life of strange species given to disguise, confusion, and camouflage” (as cited earlier), and implicitly the freedom of moving around without risking capture. And last, as seen in the scene of his execution, his transformations invest him with a legendary aura that will guarantee his

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survival in the slaves’ memories, keeping their hopes alive and despair at bay. To the masters’ puzzlement and frustration, an unshakeable faith in magic prevents the slave audience from taking the execution seriously: “The masters’ eyes questioned the faces of the slaves. But the Negroes showed spiteful indifference. What did the whites know of Negro matters?” (50). The image of Macandal bound to a post and waiting to be burned at the stake is perceived by the slaves as an expensive but useless show put up by the masters. The terrifying scene of the burning is described from two points of view: the slaves’, who cheer as their hero “flies” away (“The bonds fell off and the body of the Negro rose in the air, flying overhead, until it plunged into the black waves of the sea of slaves” [51–52]); and the omniscient narrator’s, who shows readers what the slaves fail to see―Macandal being thrown into the flames the second time around (“…very few saw that Macandal, held by ten soldiers, had been thrown head first into the fire, and that a flame fed by his burning hair had drowned his last cry” [52]). The double narrative perspective of the execution scene has prompted critics to suggest different implications and authorial intentions. For example, Christopher Warnes points out that the “narrative confirms the presumption that truth and reality lie in the empirically validated historical record―what was objectively seen and recorded at the execution―rather than in myth” (71–72). The critic’s evidence is that, after his execution, Macandal drops out of the picture, never to return in the narrative. Conversely, Donald L. Shaw believes that Carpentier makes use of the illusory myth of Macandal’s survival “to illustrate the important role played by collective faith, even when it is without foundation, in bringing about historical change” (49). While accurate, each critic’s remark is somewhat reductive in scope. Regardless of what presumption about truth and reality the narrative confirms or what the author’s intention to illustrate may be, the main fact that ought not to be overlooked is that the magical realist text describing Macandal’s burning at the stake turns upon itself in a metafictional move, by placing two incongruous ontological levels (reality and myth) on contiguous planes. Neither Macandal’s death nor his survival can

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ultimately be proven. Who is to say that the historical record is truthful and, in fact, not a forgery or at least an incomplete account of what “really” happened? Is the fictional account simply a gratuitous lie? In certain places, the text reads with the lightness and matter-offactness of a children’s tale, but in others the violence of the imagery reminds today’s readers that they are witnessing, by proxy, events from one of humanity’s darkest periods. The shifting points of view sometimes deny and at other times confer onto the magic elements in the text the believability necessary to survive (in the readers’ perception) as reality. “Carpentier keeps in deliberate irresolution the distance between imagination and the historical facts that resist imagination’s transformative magic. The magical realist technique of treating the fantastic as if it were real suggests a tempting, but too hopeful, promise of imaginative liberation” (Mikics 385). Indeed, Ti Noël will discover that the next slave revolt twenty years later (historically, forty years after Macandal’s) and the rule of Henri Christophe (the first black leader of Haiti) are only historical avatars of the same universal themes: violence, suffering, and hubris. Nothing has changed, including the hope for change itself. During the second revolt, led by the Jamaican Bouckman, the slaves are “vaguely aware of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, published by the revolutionaries in France in 1791. They rise in armed rebellion and (still convinced of the support of the African deities) loot the haciendas and rape the white women” (Shaw 29). Theoretically, looting and raping can be viewed as immediate acts of retribution, a primitive kind of justice resulting from a reversal of the vector of violence, which now becomes directed against the oppressors (including their properties and families); however, analyzing the artistic sublimation of the historical realemes (events and historical figures) of a shock chronotope into an artistic chronotope through the mediation of magical realist writing does not absolve one of ethical considerations. While it is true that trauma can affect not only victims but also perpetrators of historical violence (whether they become victims themselves or not), as well as secondary witnesses (readers, listeners, etc.), “[t]he crucial question is not only which events were experienced as so excessive that they defied

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representation or needed to be addressed through screen memories, but why, and by whom” (Fischer 136). The violence unleashed during Bouckman’s rebellion must have constituted an outlet for the pent-up anger caused not only by recent acts of physical violence but also, and maybe more importantly, by a century of abuses and humiliations. Trauma may result “from a constellation of life experiences as well as from a discrete happening, from a persisting condition as well as from an acute event” (Erikson 185). Just as violence begets violence, trauma perpetuates trauma in both victims and perpetrators. The following scene takes place on Lenormand de Mézy’s plantation as it is overrun by angry slaves: “The bookkeeper, who had appeared, pistol in hand, was the first to fall, his throat slit from top to bottom by a mason’s trowel. After bathing their arms in the blood of the white man, the Negroes ran toward the big house, shouting death to the master, to the Governor, to God, and to all the Frenchmen in the world” (73). Violence goes beyond the act of taking lives: it turns into a desecration of the oppressor’s body by treating it as an object. The guilt or innocence of the bookkeeper, just as the dubious complicity of God and “all the Frenchman in the world,” are irrelevant in this spontaneous act of revenge against the Other, the White Other. Even Ti Noël, the novel’s protagonist and the reader’s eye in the witnessing of the events, uses the anarchy of the moment to fulfill an old dream of his—raping de Mézy’s young wife, Mlle Floridor. The narrator’s noncommittal tone and use of realistic descriptions only raise the intrinsic tension in these scenes of violence. The historical fact that Bouckman was captured and executed cannot possibly have the same effect on an audience of readers or listeners as the following image from Carpentier’s novel: “The head of the Jamaican, Bouckman, green and open-mouthed, was already crawling with worms on the very spot where Macandal’s flesh had become stinking ashes. Total extermination of the Negroes was the order…” (76). A fictional image using vivid visual details not so much relays information as it induces affect. While the excerpt reads quite evidently as an expression of the traumatic imagination, the writing in this case is

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not magical realist but traumatic realist. Traumatic realism is a writing mode in which the everyday and the extremity coexist on contiguous planes. The unsettling impact of the images describing both executions, Bouckman’s rotting head and Macandal’s flying body, is due to similar stylistic devices—particularly the use of graphic details—but at the same time, it originates from completely different points of view. While readers are stimulated to visualize Bouckman’s head from an omnipresent narrator’s point of view (which alternates at times with an internalized one in Ti Noël’s character), they are led to accept the flying body of a burning man because that is what the audience in the text sees. The textualization of the reader is one of the hallmarks of magical realist writing. Magical realism relies on quite the same stylistic devices and figures of speech as most genres and modes of writing do (including traditional realism); however, the distinguishing factor is the attitude toward reality, the acceptance of its intrinsic magic (illusion, mystery) by reader, narrator, and characters. Historians might refer to the aftermath of Bouckman’s revolt by using such phrases as “savage retribution” or “fierce retaliation.” Again, however, the novel’s language conveys a lot more than mere facts: This was the road leading straight to horror. On holidays Rochambeau [the governor] began to throw Negroes to his dogs, and when the beasts hesitated to sink their teeth into a human body before the brilliant, finely clad spectators, the victim was pricked with a sword to make the tempting blood flow. On the assumption that this would keep the Negroes in their place, the Governor had sent to Cuba for hundreds of mastiffs: “They’ll be puking niggers!” (102)

I attribute such images to their author’s traumatic imagination. The artistic image of Carpentier’s language constitutes itself as a linguistic hybrid: on the one hand, it belongs to the linguistic consciousness of the author (whom I have presumed vicariously traumatized) and to the linguistic consciousness of the represented victims, on the other. However, because the linguistic consciousness of those represented by Carpentier’s language has initially belonged in texts preceding Carpentier’s, the

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symbolic mediation (the transfer between reality and the symbolic) is twofold: first, there were Columbus’s letters and the writings of nineteenth-century authors transferring the reality of the actual chronotope into different representations, and second, there is Carpentier’s novel translating (re-writing) an already represented reality into artistic images. The traumatic imagination lying at the source of this mediation is neither a reflection nor a distortion of reality: it is an inflection—if I may borrow the term that Roland Barthes applied to myth. This process of simulation results not in a Baudrillardian simulacrum (the empty shell of a reproduction of another reproduction), but in an affective simulacrum, a reproduction with more color and depth to it than the original referent. If the process may be viewed as a means of perpetuating historical trauma, it is perhaps also a way of working through it—and most importantly, a way of preventing it from happening again. Historical trauma is usually born of a loss―sudden, violent, painful, and with long-lasting effects (in behavior, affectivity, social relationships, etc.). Structural trauma, on the other hand, “is related to (even correlated with) transhistorical absence (absence of/at the origin) and appears in different ways in all societies and all lives” (LaCapra 76–77). According to Dominick LaCapra, “It may be evoked or addressed in various fashions—in terms of the separation from the (m)other, the passage from nature to culture, the eruption of the pre-oedipal or presymbolic in the symbolic […], and so forth” (76–77). There is no doubt that the trauma of the middle passage has been passed down from one generation of slaves to the next by virtue of what we now call transgenerational trauma―a phenomenon acknowledged by Glissant and more recently by Sibylle Fischer in Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. First the geographical and then the temporal remoteness of the original cultural space, followed by a series of fake identities imposed by the master/colonizer, resulted in an identity crisis that apparently kept returning, as a symptom of trauma, in the folklore of the region―as, for instance, in the following Dominican popular poem: “Yesterday I was born a Spaniard,/in the afternoon I was French,/by the evening Black I was,/today they say I am English./I don’t

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know what will become of me!” (Fischer 131). The voice in the poem reveals the state of despair and the feeling of insecurity induced by an elusive identity, caused in its turn by the absence of a foundational past; most probably, before their preservation in a written form, the lines must have circulated by word of mouth through several generations. The loss of the motherland, the erasure of the past, and the twofold trauma of a continual identity crisis left behind what Glissant calls “the transcendental presence of the Other, of his Visibility―colonizer or administrator―of his transparency fatally proposed as a model, because of which we have acquired a taste for obscurity” (Caribbean Discourse 161). In The Kingdom of This World, the “transcendental presence” of the colonizer brings about the failure of King Henri Christophe’s “liberated” Haiti. The tone of the third-person narrator suggests the slaves’ collapsing hopes through Ti Noël’s naïve perception of the “new” regime. Sans Souci, the residence of King Henri Christophe (“former cook of the rue des Espagnols”), is nothing but a replica of a French royal court: “those two white-hosed ministers descending the main stairway with leather dispatch cases under their arms were Negroes; Negro was the chef, with an ermine tail on his cap […]; those hussars curvetting about the riding ring were Negroes; […] those footmen in white wigs, whose golden buttons were being inspected by a butler in green livery, were Negroes…” (115). Stylistically, the abundance of visual details may remind one of a children’s book, where such colorful imagery is usually supposed to spur interest and stimulate imagination; the photographic, emotionless realism of the descriptions suggests the candidness and naiveté of the character through whose eyes readers come to view Henri Christophe’s court. Symbolically, the passage reveals a compulsion to repeat, to replicate the former oppressors’ visual presence and the organization of their administration. Henri Christophe’s court and reign are but symptoms of historical trauma, acted out on a macro-social scale. By the historian’s account, “Born in 1767 on the island of Grenada, […] Henri Christophe was sent off as a cabin boy at a young age. There is some disagreement among his biographers about whether he was born free or a slave, but the evidence appears to indicate that he was the son

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of free blacks or, more likely, a black and a mulatto” (Fischer 246). The historian’s rhetoric is not altogether free of doubt (“the evidence appears to indicate…”); however, what seems to count, ultimately, is the coherence of the narrative. While the novelist shows his readers a duplicate of the French court through vivid images, the historian tells his audience about it in a few succinct sentences, overwhelming it with dates and numbers: “On March 28, 1811, Christophe is proclaimed King Henri I of Haiti. In the space of a few weeks, he forges a monarchy, with all its trappings. On April 5, he announces a hereditary nobility with four princes, eight dukes, twenty-two counts, thirty-seven barons, and fourteen knights. On April 7, a church hierarchy is established…” (Fischer 253). As the novel’s protagonist is soon to find out, not only the appearance of the oppressors has survived with Henri Christophe’s coming to power but also the violence, pain, and suffering that they used to inflict on the slaves. The narrator adopts a tone of indignation when Ti Noël experiences beatings and executions of blacks at the hands of blacks: “…there was a limitless affront in being beaten by a Negro as black as oneself, as thick-lipped and wooly-headed, as flat-nosed; as low-born; perhaps branded, too. It was as though, in the same family, the children were to beat the parents, the grandson the grandmother, the daughters-in-law the mother who cooked for them” (122–123). Moreover, it appears that Henri Christophe himself oversaw the construction of the Citadel La Ferrière and randomly ordered the execution of a worker or another: “From his Napoleonic bicorne stared the bird’s-eye of a twocolored cockade. At times, with a mere wave of his crop, he ordered the death of some sluggard surprised in flagrant idleness, or the execution of workers hoisting a block of granite too slowly up a steep incline” (123). By comparison, the language of the historical text is terse and informative: “Discipline was maintained through draconian penalties. Theft was punishable by death. Workers who had to travel during the week needed a pass” (Fischer 256). Historiography mentions that Henri Christophe’s regime applied quite the same rules and laws that used to be enforced by the former white masters. Carpentier’s text, on the other hand, conveys the human dimension of those historical events, their

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physical and emotional impact on the victims’ lives. Readers’ reactions may vary accordingly: in the former case, the historical text’s effect will heavily depend on the readers’ capacity for empathy, because words such as “discipline,” “penalties,” and “death” may resonate differently in each consciousness, also depending on the subjects’ life experiences; in the latter, the graphic images of violence, the well-developed characters, and the individual stories may more readily trigger emotions on a personal level in every reader. Unlike the historical text, the fictional narrative matters on a deeper level of consciousness because it appeals to universal human emotions that are the same everywhere, whether in Port-au-Prince, or Havana, or Paris. Henri Christophe owes his death to a past that ultimately catches up with him. During the Mass of the Assumption, a ghost materializes before him: it is the specter of Corneille Breille, the Archbishop he had immured as punishment for having spoken out against him, and “whose death and decay were known to all”: “Before the altar, facing the worshippers, another priest had arisen, as though conjured out of the air, with part of his shoulders and arms still imperfectly fleshed out. And while his face was taking on contour and expression, from his lipless, toothless mouth, as black as a rat-hole, a thundering voice emerged…” (137). Through its symbolic power, the Archbishop’s ghost brings to mind Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, the memento of a past that will never go away. In the context of our analysis, the ghost functions as an ontological link between the excessive reality of the text and the often overlooked excesses of the readers’ own reality. “Ghosts embody the fundamental magical realist sense that reality always exceeds our capacities to describe or understand or prove and that the function of literature is to engage this excessive reality, to honor that which we may grasp intuitively but never fully or finally define” (Parkinson Zamora 498). When the narrator’s focus returns to the King, he lies “on the floor paralyzed, his eyes riveted on the roof beams [of the church]” (138), leaving readers wondering whether it was a stroke or a thunderbolt that caused his stupor. As Henri Christophe’s palace is burning―during the insurrection that eventually ends his rule―and the fire is lighting up the mirrors, it

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seems as if the two ontological levels of the text (the historical realemes and their fictional representations) collapse into each other: “the flames were everywhere, and it was impossible to tell which were flames and which reflections. All the mirrors of Sans Souci were simultaneously ablaze” (149–150). The palace where the colonial past and its replica were forced to live side by side crumbles under the weight of a historical hubris: preserving a violent past leads to paralysis and a foreclosure of the future, including every glimmer of hope that a future, any future, might carry. * In Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), it is both the ghosts of slavery and the demons of a hybrid identity that catch up with and ultimately destroy the main character, Antoinette Cosway. Rhys’s intertextual supplementation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is at the same time a challenging portrayal of post-slavery Jamaica, viewed from the perspective of a descendant of the slaveholder class. Historical trauma in Rhys’s novel is experienced on two contiguous levels: 1) as individual loss, affecting the hybrid identities of Mrs. Cosway and her daughter Antoinette, a young “Creole of pure English descent, […] not English or European either” (67); and 2) as a collective cultural loss, resulting from the violent erasure of the identity of an entire social group and race. The narrative gains suggestiveness and plausibility particularly because both levels are either experienced or revealed through witnessing by two firstperson narrators, Antoinette in Part One and Part Three, and her husband in Part Two. Interestingly enough, Rhys’s imagery seems more susceptible to an analysis based on the marvelous real than even Carpentier’s: even though the term was coined by Carpentier in order to counterbalance that of “magical realism” (which he relegated exclusively to the realm of European painting), Carpentier’s images are more likely to be described as magical realist than Rhys’s. Rhys’s magic does not reside in any spectacular miracles (such as flying or metamorphosing human bodies, levitating ghosts, or hot-oil-proof witches) but in the Caribbean landscape itself—beautiful, tragic, and threatening, all at the same time.

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For an understanding of Rhys’s writing as an expression of the traumatic imagination, a brief etiology of Wide Sargasso Sea is as necessary as it would be in the case of any other trauma narrative. As others have already remarked, the novel demonstrates how an author’s personal trauma may become conflated with a historical one, such as slavery, and can “find expression in fiction as an aesthetic mode providing recognition and healing” (Kuwahara 194). The author’s personal trauma, even if not directly linked to the chronotope of slavery, finds an outlet through her writing as an act of artistic testimony. At sixteen, Rhys left Dominica (Windward Islands), where she was born and raised, and spent World War I and the next ten years of her life in Europe, mainly in Paris and Vienna. Her father was a Welsh doctor, and her mother a white West Indian. In the 1966 introduction to the novel, Francis Wyndham describes Rhys’s life in Europe as “rootless” and “wandering” (5), behavior that may often be symptomatic of trauma. Viewed primarily as an attempt to signify a traumatic hole in the chain of signification (cf. Lacan and Žižek), Rhys’s novel can be read as a narrative of the impossible, that is, a text that writes, rather than writes about, individual and historical trauma. (Writing about is exactly what a traumatic experience usually forecloses.) The text seems to be constantly searching for the most appropriate linguistic means to speak the unspeakable, pointing to its author’s obsession with the forms of literary expression. Discussing Rhys’s emphasis on style and form, Patricia Moran mentions the personal conflict between Rhys and her mother, whom she considered “rejecting, dangerous and punitive―a source of emotional pain so deep that it arguably haunted her for her entire life” (Moran 149). Consequently, “Rhys’s extraordinary emphasis on style and form serves as a kind of ‘anodyne’―her favorite word, she repeatedly said―a way to dull the pain and make the ‘unlovely stuff’ ‘lovely’ through work on the material” (Moran 149). Writing as therapy is certainly not unusual among writers, but in the case of trauma novels it also requires courage and the willingness to confront the likely prospect of re-traumatization; whether paying special attention to style and form can actually make the “unlovely stuff” “lovely” remains debatable, of course, unless one

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chooses to consider writing fiction a deliberate process of creating what Freud called a “screen memory” (Deckerinnerungen), one that “stands in or substitutes for a more disturbing or painful memory that it displaces from consciousness” (Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory 13). Rhys’s writing about post-slavery Jamaica may thus function as a screen memory meant to cover up traumatic events of a personal nature. Individual and collective loss are experienced on two contiguous levels and communicated subconsciously by Rhys’s Creole characters, Antoinette and her mother, Mrs. Cosway: “To die and be forgotten and at peace. Not to know that one is abandoned, lied about, helpless. All the ones who died―who says a good word for them now?” (21–22). When Mrs. Cosway utters these words, readers have already witnessed through her daughter Antoinette’s voice the painful times that she has gone through after her husband’s death, constantly subjected to the opprobrium and hatred of her entire household and community. Consequently, the first three sentences sound like the predictably dark thoughts of a depressed (or melancholic) subject. However, the infinitives and the impersonal pronoun “one” suggest a generalizing, even philosophical mood, so puzzled readers might ask themselves, Who died? For whom are we supposed to mourn, or say “a good word”? The unnamed past, which apparently fuels a sense of guilt in Antoinette’s mother (she belonged to the slave-owners’ class), is too atrocious to be molded into rational sentences: language here projects individual loss against and into a larger historical context, in which the trauma of loss acquires transgenerational dimensions. Ethically challengeable, the white Creoles’ trauma can never be made analogous with that of the victims; whether direct perpetrators or just passive witnesses (but still beneficiaries of the slaves’ suffering and misery), all former plantation owners were generally (and probably rightly) assumed to have had blood on their hands. “Caught between two cultures, connected with both black and white but belonging to neither, Antoinette represents both victim and oppressor, the colonizer and the colonized” (Kuwahara 183). Therefore, her final self-destructive act comes about as the outcome of an untenable tension between nostalgia and perpetrator’s guilt.

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The word choices made by Antoinette’s mother, Mrs. Cosway―“To die and be forgotten and at peace. Not to know that one is abandoned, lied about, helpless. All the ones who died…” (21–22, my emphases)— are not the only ones revealing multiple layers of signification. The repetition, in many other contexts, of “leave,” “abandon,” “go away,” and “die” points to so many instances of loss: somebody or something used to be there in an undefined past, and now it is not―but his/her or its absence68 in the present becomes symptomatic of trauma. Therefore, I believe that Mrs. Cosway’s and Antoinette’s traumata originate not only in individual loss (husband, lover, friend, fortune, or social status) but also in an absence “inherited” through generations of slaves and former slaveholders. It is this stratified, transhistorical absence of a “pure” identity (neither black nor English) that underlies the individual structural trauma of Rhys’s main female characters: their personal losses throughout the narrative only intensify this historical absence. Rochester’s thoughts while watching Antoinette reveal her hybridity and strangeness, as well as the unbridgeable gap between her world and the Englishman’s: “She never blinks at all it seems to me. Long, sad, dark alien eyes. Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English, or European either” (67). Moreover, later in the narrative, he will indirectly connect Antoinette’s strangeness to the magical features of a “zombi,” whose definition he comes to read in The Glittering Coronet of Isles: “‘A zombi is a dead person who seems to be alive or a living person who is dead. A zombi can also be the spirit of a place, usually malignant but sometimes to be propitiated with sacrifices or offerings of flowers and fruit’ ” (107). Even if only superficially, Rochester seems to try to understand, up to a certain point, at least, the magic of the place, and he does so by reading travel books; what he fails to realize is that the authors of those books might have been just as puzzled by and frustrated with the beauty and the ominous radiance of the islands as he is. Therefore, instead of helping him get in touch with the spirit of the place and its people, travel literature only reinforces his metropolitan biases. His only conduit toward the magical core of the place would be his wife, if he only knew how to get closer to her. But Antoinette is just as much of a zombi (meaning

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just as traumatized) as her mother was. When Rochester asks her, “Why did you tell me that she died when you were a child?” she answers, “Because they told me to say so and because it is true. She did die when I was a child. There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about” (128). Rochester cannot bring himself to be a listener, or, when he does, he lacks the empathy necessary to feel Antoinette’s pain. “The traumatized carry an impossible history within them,” claims Cathy Caruth, “or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess” (“Introduction” 5). In Antoinette’s and Mrs. Cosway’s cases, personal history becomes contiguous with a larger “impossible” History, whose violence just will not fade away. Consequently, if historical absence and individual loss are likely to be conflated at the level of individual consciousness, can one still speak of the same kind of trauma? While Mrs. Cosway’s and Antoinette’s traumata are caused by both a transhistorical absence and a series of painful individual losses, the latter, however, do not rise to historical dimensions. “Historical trauma is specific, and not everyone is subject to it or entitled to the subject position associated with it” (LaCapra 78). And yet, if Rhys’s characters can be considered as “historically” traumatized, then it is in the context mentioned before: that of the gradual erasure of their identities. To find one’s identity and repossess the sense of an origin lost in the violence of history becomes an impossible battle for both the author and her characters/narrators. Even if the authorial discourse is disguised in the characters’ voice, the ensuing text constitutes itself as a narrative of the impossible also because it constantly attempts to grasp and represent an impossible struggle. For example, it is in vain that Antoinette tries to share with her English husband the fact that she is called “white cockroach” by the African Caribbeans and “white nigger” by the English: “So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all” (102). The feeling of exile, of never belonging to a well-defined cultural space engenders an underlying sense of purposelessness. Heart-rending as Antoinette’s confession may sound, her husband is unable to sympathize with her worsening identity crisis. On the contrary, he brings his

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own contribution to it by refusing to call her by her name. Antoinette’s resistance is futile: “Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name. I know, that’s obeah, too” (147). In a postcolonial context, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak views Antoinette’s character as a victim of British politics, which would make Rochester’s character a prosopopoeia of British colonialism: “In the figure of Antoinette, whom in Wide Sargasso Sea Rochester violently renames Bertha, Rhys suggests that so intimate a thing as a personal and human identity might be determined by the politics of imperialism. Antoinette, as a white Creole child growing up at the time of emancipation in Jamaica, is caught between the English imperialism and the black native” (Spivak 125–126). The eccentricities of Antoinette’s identitysociety’s refusal to acknowledge her hybridity and her own failure to recognize her mental paralysis―will ultimately lead to her psychological undoing and eventual suicide in the last pages of the novel. Given her Creole background, her identity crisis has an immediate cause as well: rejection by a society recently emancipated and still struggling to recover its identity. The novel’s newly liberated Jamaica has not come to terms with its past yet. Its violent history, as slightly hinted at by Mrs. Cosway in the beginning, is hidden here and there, in the characters’ dialogues and thoughts. On arriving at their honeymoon destination, Antoinette shows surprise at her husband’s question, “Who was massacred here? Slaves?” Rochester’s astonishment and somewhat touristic curiosity have come from learning the name of the village: Massacre. “ ‘Oh no.’ [Antoinette] sounded shocked. ‘Not slaves. Something must have happened a long time ago. Nobody remembers now” (65–66). It is, of course, not a faulty memory that is being suggested here but a subconscious refusal to remember, to revisit the events that caused trauma: Antoinette and all the other islanders simply avoid any mentioning of the horrific events of the island’s violent past. However, memories cannot lie; if lies survive, memories die. “Many died in those days,” Antoinette recalls, “both white and black, especially the older people, but no one speaks of those days now. They are forgotten, except the lies. Lies are never forgotten,

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they go on and they grow” (131). Refusing to remember can only lead to more lies and to the insistence of traumatic memories: they will keep returning in more or less visible symptoms, and will be acted out in unusual patterns of behavior. If the violent past only rarely surfaces in Rhys’s text, historians and primary witnesses, on the other hand, have described it in minute detail. The bloodiest event preceding emancipation in Jamaica was probably the Montego Bay revolt in December 1831 (continued in 1832), which could also explain the hatred and acts of violence against Creoles (the colonizers’ descendants born in the islands) after emancipation. In Empire, Enslavement, and Freedom in the Caribbean, Michael Craton describes the aftermath of the revolt by using the historian’s restrained tone and terse (and implicitly objectivity-prone) language: Many slaves, including women and children, were shot on sight, slave huts and provision grounds were systematically burned, and there were numerous judicial murders by summary courts martial. After the revolt, damages were assessed by the planters at well over £1 million, but this total included damage caused by the military themselves and by the slaves simply in retaliation, and also the estimated value of the slaves killed. Only 14 free men died in the rebellion but over 200 slaves were killed in the fighting, with 312 executed and 300 others flogged, imprisoned for life or transported.” (Craton 293)

As in the case of historical accounts of the Haitian slave revolts, even though Craton’s text often uses words signifying violence, such as “shot,” “burned,” “killed,” “executed,” and “flogged,” it mostly relies on numbers—which is not truly surprising, because the general scientific assumption in establishing “the truth,” including historical truth, is that it should be quantifiable with as much accuracy as possible in exact digits. However, human pain and suffering are not measurable in numbers, and the silenced voices of history cannot be justly resurrected by using dubious or second-hand evidence, or materials coming exclusively from the perpetrators of historical violence.69 The “shock” value of the shock chronotope should be treated as such: as a negative ethical value,

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as a moral reminder without which human society could hardly come to terms with its past—and ultimately with itself—and move on toward a genuinely humane future. If there is anything to be learned from history, then it should be done by creating empathy toward it, by feeling and (re) living it as though it were one’s own. Therefore, artistic chronotopes, as mediated re-presentations of the shock chronotopes, may ultimately have an effect of catharsis on their audiences; otherwise, if untended to, trauma can easily destroy most consciousnesses affected by it, stifle subjectivity, impede true communication, or undo the very fabric of healthy social relations. By constantly acting out trauma and failing to overcome the paralyzing effects of melancholia (depression), Rhys’s characters portray the devastating consequences of the latter scenario. Between the historian’s detached and Rhys’s emotional rendering of Jamaican slavery lies the memoirist/travelogue mode of writing as in, for example, Henry Bleby’s Death Struggles of Slavery: Being a Narrative of Facts and Incidents, which Occurred in a British Colony, during the Two Years Immediately Preceding Negro Emancipation. The voice of the first-person narrator recounts several traumatic events following the Montego Bay revolt as viewed by a primary eyewitness. Bleby refers to a few specific events by describing the concrete scenes that he himself has witnessed. By comparison to the historian’s account, Bleby’s makes extensive use of graphic images of physical violence or its aftermath— which I take as likely indications of their traumatic impact on his consciousness: “Sixteen bodies, dragged into the road, were putrefying in the sun when we passed by, presenting a horrible spectacle. […] The stench was distinctly perceptible at the distance of a quarter of a mile, and, when we came near the spot, was almost overpowering” (Bleby 20). The witness’s attention for sensory details (visual and olfactory in this scene) is remarkably effective in its suggestiveness. In most of Bleby’s descriptions, the central image is the defiled human body, reduced to the status of disposable waste: “There lay one body, the head of which was completely stripped of flesh by the crows […]. The entrails of several had been torn out by these ravenous creatures, and lay scattered about the road; and here and there were limbs from which they had torn the

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clothes, and stripped the flesh to the bone” (Bleby 21). Following the random killings that occurred during the revolt, the retaliatory executions ordered by authorities in its aftermath account for a society spinning out of control, benumbed by the extent of the violence inflicted both on it and by it. Probably intending to suggest the scale of the atrocities committed by the white masters, Bleby also introduces hearsay information into his own account. “In the market-place of one town alone, it is said, about one hundred executions took place; which number I believe to be far below the mark. Many of these I witnessed myself” (Bleby 29). Moreover, executions seem to have become such ordinary events that witnesses became desensitized and started showing signs of psychic numbing, one of the most common symptoms of trauma: So frequent had these revolting exhibitions become, that they scarcely attracted notice from the bystanders. I have seen three men led out, tied up to the gibbet, and launched into eternity in the public market-place, and people around occupied in buying and selling, and scarcely turning round their heads to look at the awful scene that was being enacted in their presence; so entirely had they become familiarized with the slaughter of their fellowcreatures! (Bleby 30)

Judging by Bleby’s account, Jamaican society must have reached that critical tipping point in the life of any society, where the extraordinary becomes part of the ordinary and undermines the ethical fabric that is supposed to hold society together.70 Moreover, violence becomes so rampant that even the maroons, the legendary outcasts and freedom fighters glorified by Carpentier in the character of Macandal, sell out to the Jamaican authorities, and join in the reprisals: “the Maroons were paid for the slaughter of the negroes according to the number of their victims, receiving a stipulated price for every pair of negroes’ ears which they were able to produce to the militia authorities. […] I have not the slightest doubt that scores of slaves, innocent of all participation in the revolt, were shot by the Maroons, for no other purpose than to obtain their ears for sale” (Bleby 23). This is the shock chronotope on which Rhys builds

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her novel, even if, as mentioned, Jamaica’s violent history is not explicitly present in its text but only hinted at in the characters’ words and in descriptions of the natural landscape—facts which in themselves speak for the latency and the transgenerational nature of trauma. As in the case of Carpentier’s Haiti, Jamaican “liberation” has not changed the former slaves’ and their descendants’ lives in any significant way, a fact Glissant also discusses in reference to the Caribbean post-slavery phenomenon: “The ‘liberation’ of the slaves created another trauma, which comes from the trap of citizenship granted; that is, conceded; that is, imposed” (Caribbean Discourse 161). If the original trauma was caused by violent removal from an African homeland and subsequent treatment as expendable work-animals, the abolition of slavery failed to solve, or might even have worsened, the identity crisis of the African Caribbeans: now they were tolerated as second-class citizens—just another semantic unit for more or less the same referent. The novel’s raisonneuse character, Christophine (a former slave from Martinique, Mr. Cosway’s “wedding present” to Antoinette’s mother), justly remarks that the new institutions and instruments of power are not much different from the slaveholders’ coercive apparatus: “No more slavery! [Christophine] had to laugh! ‘These new [English owners] have Letter of the Law. Same thing. They got magistrate. They got fine. They got jail house and chain gang. They got tread machine to mash up people’s feet. New ones worse than old ones―more cunning, that’s all’ ” (26). Her enumeration of the new instruments of power is suggestive of a Foucauldian transition from monarchal power (the right of life and death over the subject’s body) to a more subtle (“more cunning”) disciplinary power. Christophine is quick to adapt to the new power relations by using her specific survival skills, such as keeping to a specific dress code and language that usually only an outsider, that is, a non-Jamaican, would be likely to develop: “No other negro woman [in Jamaica] wore black, or tied her handkerchief Martinique fashion. She had a quiet voice and a quiet laugh (when she did laugh), and though she could speak good English if she wanted to, and French as well as patois, she took care to talk as [Jamaicans] talked” (21). Picking a language of her choice

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becomes a means of self-empowerment in Christophine’s world, an expression of her free will, as well as a form of personal resistance. Whether oral or written, language also carries a healing potential in its ontology. According to LaCapra, “acting out and working through […] are interrelated modes of responding to loss or historical trauma” (65). One should keep in mind that the distinction between these two usually unconscious reactions to trauma is more theoretical than real (as Charcot, Freud’s early master, said, “Theory is good, but it doesn’t prevent things from being”). Acting out, for example, by constantly returning to a horrifying event in one’s writing, may also be viewed as, and more often than not is, just another way of working through trauma. The two psychological conditions corresponding to these reactions to trauma are referred to by Freud as “mourning” and “melancholia” (the latter is what we now call “depression”). LaCapra suggests that “mourning might be seen as a form of working through, and melancholia as a form of acting out” (65), which would mean that in the process of mourning, the lost object is constantly kept in view, remembered, missed, and revisited on a more or less conscious level. In a state of melancholia, however, the subject is usually unaware of the loss that has caused the traumatic response, and acting out often acquires forms that do not directly indicate the object of that loss. Viewed in this light, Antoinette’s gradual mental degradation would speak for an ongoing state of melancholia, rather than one of mourning. “Mourning brings the possibility of engaging trauma and achieving a reinvestment in […] life which allows one to begin again” (LaCapra 66). Sadly, Antoinette will never be given that chance. And yet, she does not come across as a weak character: whenever she seems to accommodate others, particularly her friend Tia (who ends up throwing a stone at her) and her husband, Rochester (who tramples her dignity), she actually demonstrates strength of character, generosity, and more capacity for empathy than any other character does except, perhaps, for Christophine, her mother by proxy. Most characters, including her husband, mistake Antoinette’s extraordinary sensibility and capacity for empathy for signs of weakness, or even as an onset of madness. However, her acute lucidity does not leave

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her even in moments when she comes under attack by someone close to her, such as her husband, Rochester, who verbally abuses her, or her only friend, Tia, who physically assaults her. The violent encounter with Tia—which ends the scene in which the Cosways’ Coulibri house is set on fire by an angry mob of former slaves—is a double reflection on both heroines’ characters. Antoinette is slow to realize (not because she is slow, but because she refuses to) that Tia has become part of the mob set on punishing the Cosways and settle the score of decades of abuse. “When I was close I saw the jagged stone in her hand but I did not see her throw it. I did not feel it either, only something wet, running down my face. I looked at her and I saw her face crumple up as she began to cry. We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass” (45). The significance of the scene involves more than just an emotional clash between two childhood friends. The looking-glass metaphor (a recurring motif in the novel) suggests that, in fact, it might be not Tia who throws the stone but Antoinette herself, in a desperate gesture of self-flagellation. (As a matter of fact, Antoinette was alert enough to anticipate Tia’s intentionwhich, however, she refused to―so she would have had enough time to dodge the stone.) Subconsciously, Antoinette carries in her an inherited sense of guilt for the crimes of her predecessors: it is the blood they have spilled that she now feels she must redeem, so she seems to be acting out the transgenerational trauma of the perpetrators of historical violence. Just how traumatizing this episode has been for her on a direct, individual level, as well, will be revealed a little later, when she is recovering in Aunt Cora’s house: “I was ill for a long time. My head was bandaged because someone had thrown a stone at me. Aunt Cora told me that it was healing up and it wouldn’t spoil me on my wedding day. But I think it did spoil me for my wedding day and all the other days and nights” (133). Antoinette displays the unmistakable trauma symptoms of memory lapse and psychic numbing: her consciousness has shut out the memory of her best friend throwing a stone at her―she does not want to remember her name―and the psychic wound, unlike the physical one, will stay with her for the rest of her life, until she ends it by suicide.

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Most traumatized subjects feel a constant urge to tell their story, and are always on the lookout for an audience willing to listen and to understand. As a first-person narrator and the most important voice in the novel, Antoinette reiterates, over and over again, the need for remembering and telling her story: “Quickly, while I can, I must remember the hot classroom” (53). The sense of urgency (“Quickly, while I can”) may have been induced from an anxiety to forget; more often than not, forgetting can bring about the insistent recurrence of unprocessed (unassimilated) memories, that is, a likely vulnerability to trauma. When Antoinette repeats several times in the narrative (in reference to the morning when she found her mother’s dead horse), “I thought if I told no one it might not be true” (18), or “Say nothing and it may not be true” (59), she deliberately forecloses what she perceives as the dangerous power of the word. By reversing the negativity of her sentence, the reader could infer that in order for an event to be true, it has to be told: for truth to become truth, it needs an act of telling. Frequent in postmodernist fiction, metafictional references are a hallmark of most magical realist texts. According to Wendy B. Faris, “Metafictional dimensions are common in contemporary magical realism: the texts provide commentaries on themselves […]. Thus the magical power of fiction itself, […] and the elements out of which it is made―signs, images, metaphors, narrators, narratees―may be foregrounded” (Faris 175). Behind Antoinette’s story, readers are likely to infer the presence of Rhys’s authorial voice. Through Antoinette, the implied author invests the past with a voice in order to work through, perhaps, her own trauma. However, working through trauma by writing about it may not always be an entirely conscious act; more often than not, it also attests to a symptom of acting out trauma: “[Writing trauma] involves processes of acting out, working over, and to some extent working through in analyzing and ‘giving voice’ to the past— processes of coming to terms with traumatic ‘experiences,’ limit events, and their symptomatic effects that achieve articulation in different combination and hybridized forms” (186). In other words, the act of writing invests the witness/survivor, or the secondary witness/vicariously

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traumatized, with the power to overcome the impossibility of testifying to one’s trauma. By comparison to Carpentier’s overwhelming magic within a crude, violence-marred reality, Rhys’s magic is more low-key, subtle, and understated, spread thin throughout the narrative: her magic makes itself felt as a ubiquitous tension present in most of the descriptions and dialogues in the novel. In Rhys’s text, the marvelous real, which Carpentier assigned exclusively to the natural and literary landscapes of Latin America, comes to life from the characters’ points of view: while Rochester finds the Caribbean “unreal,” Antoinette thinks of England in the same way. The following dialogue, recounted by Rochester, is just one of the instances that reveal the unbridgeable cultural and emotional gap between Antoinette and him: -‘Is it true,’ she said, that England is like a dream?’ […] -‘Well,’ I answered annoyed, ‘that is precisely how your beautiful island seems to me, quite unreal and like a dream.’ -‘But how can rivers and mountains and the sea be unreal?’ -‘And how can millions of people, their houses and their streets be unreal?’ -‘More easily,’ she said, ‘much more easily. Yes, a big city must be like a dream.’ -‘No, this is unreal and like a dream,’ I thought. (80–81)

In the Englishman’s point of view, the unreal originates in an excess of reality, in an exacerbation of the visual detail: “Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near. And the woman is a stranger” (70). Moreover, Antoinette’s Creole identity has instilled in Rochester a feeling of the uncanny, a combination of an unexplainable familiarity (the English origin) and an apparent novelty (the Caribbean attitude). Rochester’s senses are not ready for the reality of the Caribbean; his mind simply refuses to take in the otherness of the place and of its people, including his wife. On the other hand, English reality exists exclusively in Antoinette’s mind: her images have come from reading about

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England, without any immediate experiencing of its reality. Therefore, the “right” words describing England, such as “Exports, coal, iron, wool. Then Imports and Character of Inhabitants. Names, Essex, Chelmsford on the Chelmer. The Yorkshire and Lincolnshire wolds” (111), mean little or close to nothing to her. Her imagination can only form images based on Caribbean references that she has experienced directly: “There are fields of corn like sugar-cane fields, but gold colour and not so tall. After summer the trees are bare, then winter and snow. White feathers falling? Torn pieces of paper falling?” (111). Apparently, the “right” word for the English reality of “snow” is nothing but a blank signifier for Antoinette, which can only acquire meaning by analogy to a familiar reality―“white feathers” or “torn pieces of paper falling.” Herein, in this juxtaposition of two real and at the same time unreal worlds, lies the essence of magic in magical realism: reality is real only as long as it can be described in a way that matters to the audience (reader, viewer, or listener); paradoxically, reality becomes unreal and strange whenever it is rendered with the right words for the sake of reason and objectivity, and not for the sake of the audience’s affects. Lacking any direct experience with English reality, Antoinette can only imagine it by substituting its signifiers with Caribbean referents. Her husband, on the other hand, who himself has come to the islands with expectations based on an imagined reality (readings, hearsay, etc.), seems unable to let go of his pre- and misconceptions, and take in the new reality―hence, the uncanny feeling that the truth lies in the unreal and the dream. However, as much as he wishes to rid himself of the lies that keep him out of touch with the reality of the islands, he is defeated by his own cultural heritage: “I was certain that everything I had imagined to be truth was false. False. Only the magic and the dream were true―all the rest’s a lie. Let it go. Here is the secret. Here” (167–168). Rochester might be symbolically enunciating one of the basic premises of the magical realist text: only the magic and the dream can be true because they are the only discursive elements able to evoke the unspeakable and to compensate for the inadequacies of realistic language. Instead of surrendering himself to the magic of the place, Rochester responds to it

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with hatred: “I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated the beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her [Antoinette]. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness” (172). What Rochester does not seem to realize is that he hates himself―most likely for not being able to embrace the “magic and the loveliness”; therefore, he redirects his self-hatred towards what he feels attracted to, but fears to love. Rhys and Carpentier juxtapose the magic of the Caribbean with one of the most horrific chronotopes ever represented in literature. Neither of them was a victim or a primary witness of slavery, and yet, by reading about it, they vicariously relived its horrors and evoked them in their writing. Why would two cosmopolitan authors return to their homelands and, most importantly, imaginatively revisit their two-hundred-yearold violent histories? What are the ethical implications of reading testimony or secondary witnessing? In her discussion of literary texts that try to deal with extreme events, Shoshana Felman raises a few intriguing questions, such as, “Is the act of reading literary texts itself inherently related to the act of facing horror? If literature is the alignment between witnesses, what would this alignment mean?” (Felman 14). Rhys’s and Carpentier’s novels can only prompt a positive answer: facing the horror demands courage; writing about it asks for responsibility. These two Caribbean authors’ texts create “an alignment between witnesses,” a rhizomatic relationship outside of which neither author, nor narrator/ character, nor readers can preserve their identities. Witnesses can only assert their identities in relation to other individuals, that is, other potential witnesses, through testifying, telling, breaking the silence to which (vicarious) trauma has condemned them. * As Carpentier and Rhys had done before her, Maryse Condé started to write because she needed to remember; however, after having dwelt on the topic of slavery for over twenty-five years, she felt, by her own admission, that she had to drop the subject and move on. In an interview

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with Doris Y. Kadish, Condé said, “I have decided sometimes in my life to stop remembering slavery. I have often decided: I am not going to write even one line about slavery any longer, and let’s go forward. As long as you keep looking at the past you cannot go forward” (Kadish 220). In the same interview, she expressed her uneasiness about the moral implications of vicarious traumatization: “Sometimes we have a tendency to see ourselves all the time as victims and to dwell on the memory of the sufferings of the ancestors” (220). Condé’s concern with remembering the past is twofold: first, dwelling on memories of pain and suffering may lead to a state of endless melancholia (Freud’s term for depression), to a paralysis of will, and to a pre-death deadness (zombification) as undergone by Rhys’s female protagonists; and second, remembering someone else’s past might also lead to an identification with the victims, an assumption of their pain and suffering, and ultimately the unwanted, or at least unintentional, adoption of an undeserved authority. Moreover, linked closely to Condé’s former concern is her fear that too much concentration on the past might turn one’s focus away from matters challenging the present world, and become a distraction or a subconscious form of escapism: “I’m afraid that while we are thinking of slavery where everything is in black and white (without un jeu de mots) that maybe we forget what is going on around ourselves in the world today, in the country where we are living today, and maybe it is a kind of easy―not easy, but often said, often described―way out” (Kadish 220). While understandable, this kind of uncertainty should not, however, prevent anyone, either producers or consumers of theoretical thought and artistic representations, from revisiting the horrors of the past, if only to build from them a more complex perspective to illuminate current social and political troubles. Should humanity choose to ignore or even only downplay the importance of this legacy, the risk of repeating the horrible mistakes of its history looms more ominously than ever: international sex slavery, sweatshops, and ongoing racial discrimination (in the economic, social, and political spheres) are only a few of the surviving facets of an evil that human society wrongly assumed (hoped) to have put behind it more than a century ago.

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Significantly, trauma enters Condé’s novel I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1986) abruptly, shockingly, starting with the lead paragraph. Tituba, the main character and first-person narrator, is born from it: “Abena, my mother, was raped by an English sailor on the deck of Christ the King one day in the year 16** while the ship was sailing for Barbados. I was born from this act of hatred and contempt” (3). Without any further elaboration on the irony implied in the vessel’s name, let it be noted that the bigotry and aggressiveness of the Christian faith will be contrasted to the purity and peacefulness of African animistic beliefs and practices many times throughout the narrative. The incomplete year, suggesting only the century in which the novel takes place, and the destination of the ship set up a presumably familiar chronotope in the readers’ minds, so that the following scenes can unfold without any other kind of introduction. The main character receives her name from Yao, an Ashanti slave to whom the master has given Abena to punish her for hiding her pregnancy: “Tituba. TI-TU-BA. It’s not an Ashanti name. Yao probably invented it to prove that I was the daughter of his will and imagination. Daughter of his love” (6). The symbolism of this act of naming suggests that the surrogate father’s will and imagination quite literally give the child a second chance at being born, but this time out of love, not hatred and contempt. I also interpret Yao’s gesture as an act of creation similar to writing, with the power to work through trauma by revisiting and re-creating its origin. Tituba comes into being, is called into being, by both the implied author, Condé, and another fictional character, Yao. In the words of Tsitsi Jaji, “If naming […] can be performed outside the bonds of kinship in the limit case of slavery, the implication is that the author of fiction may also forge an imaginative bond, conferring on the living-dead with whom she shares no kinship bonds a textual immortality” (57). The historical realeme—the real-life person called Tituba, the only black defendant in the Salem witch trials, according to historical evidence—has been so long denied a human dimension with a voice of its own. Similarly to Carpentier’s secondary witnessing of Haitian slavery through reading, Condé uses her knowledge of the seventeenthcentury Anglophone Caribbean as well as historical documents from

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the Massachusetts Bay colony to flesh out a voiceless realeme: Tituba comes to life in her pages as part of an artistic shock chronotope whose real-life correspondent has entirely foreclosed the voices of its victims. Through Condé’s (and the readers’) traumatic imagination, magical realist writing not only represents the shock chronotope, but evokes it by investing it with affect—the exact element of which trauma has bereft it in the first place. Therefore, on a symbolic level, I understand the character of Tituba as a prosopopoeia of revitalized history, as a naming of trauma itself. In the course of the narrative, Tituba experiences her own share of traumatic events, starting with rejection by her mother, Abena, who keeps seeing in the child the pain and humiliation of her rape on the deck of Christ the King. At the age of seven, Tituba witnesses a rape attempt on her mother by their master, Darnell Davis. This time, however, Abena fights back by striking and wounding the man with a cutlass—a transgression punishable always, without exception, by death. The words “They hanged my mother” are repeated three times, at the beginning of each paragraph detailing the execution, and suggest the narrator’s fixation on—and possession by—the traumatizing image: “When her body swung round and round in the air, I gathered up enough strength to tiptoe away and vomit my heart out in the grass” (8). The narrator’s attention to detail and her overall mature, balanced, and often philosophical tone find their justification at the end of the narrative, after her own hanging: only then can readers realize that the voice telling the story has been a ghost’s voice all along, and that the point of view has come from the perspective of an already accomplished life cycle. In retaliation for Abena’s crime, Darnell sells Yao to another plantation owner. His life now completely emptied of meaning, Yao commits suicide by swallowing his tongue. However, he is not the only character in the novel who chooses to end his own life: suicide is a recurrent motif throughout the text, and seems justified by at least two reasons. First, suicide was, historically, an expression of slave resistance (there were cases reported from as early on as the crossing of the Atlantic71) and even “an offensive measure that could go beyond purely personal

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considerations and, in the same blow, aim at the economic base of the planter” (Fick 48). Regardless of its meanings, suicide has always been an act of self-destruction. Robert Lifton recognizes as its essential feature “its violent statement about human connection, broken and maintained” (Lifton 239). By putting an end to his life, Yao in fact saves his connection to his beloved Abena and to Tituba, the stepdaughter who has given a new meaning to his life: a life without them becomes simply inconceivable. Later in the novel, as if echoing Yao’s uncompromising spirit, Hester, Tituba’s temporary cellmate in Salem, will hang herself because she cannot accept being punished for her choice in love (which society deems as adultery); and Laetitia, a young slave who has repeatedly swallowed her tongue, will finally poison herself because she cannot stand being christened with such a “barbarious and incongruous name” (178). Hester saves her free will by choosing the time of her own death, while Laetitia preserves her African identity (name) by refusing a priest’s arbitrary imposition on it. Consequently, the other reason for suicide in Condé’s novel seems to carry existentialist connotations. For example, Yao, Hester, and Laetitia can finally make their own choices and create a future of sorts for themselves only by suicide, which confirms Gabriel Marcel’s description of the act as a “ ‘radical rejection of being’ that is at the same time ‘a demonic affirmation of self’ ” (Lifton 249–250). Although Tituba’s character will reject any act that goes against life and the enjoyment of life, on hearing about Hester’s suicide she is so overwhelmed by anger that she lashes out against existence itself, against the very act of being born: “I screamed down the door of my mother’s womb. My fist broke her bag of waters in rage and despair. I choked and suffocated in this black liquid. I wanted to drown myself” (111). The wish of having rather clung to the mother’s womb instead of entering a treacherous world—the desperate drive to suicide in the womb—is probably the strongest, even if unreal, affirmation of one’s will. In this context, suicide amounts to a preservation of one’s integrity, to a visceral refusal to compromise with an unjust world. Being born in slavery or judged for arbitrary crimes in Kafkaesque trials foreclose ab initio the possibility of

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any freedom of choice, and bring about deadness before one’s death: in such scenarios, suicide remains the only viable option for expressing one’s will and asserting one’s identity. After her mother’s execution, seven-year-old Tituba is sent off the plantation, but fortunately, she is taken in and raised by an old woman, Mama Yaya—significantly, another traumatized character (“As she had seen her man and two sons tortured to death for instigating a slave revolt, she seemed to act deranged” [8]). Mama Yaya possesses powers usually assigned to a clairvoyant, a psychic, a natural healer, or a prophet, but she is in fact a bearer of African animistic beliefs, which she lovingly passes on to Tituba. With the introduction of Mama Yaya into the narrative, the text acquires a more complex ontological structure, and its layers of signification deepen by the addition of magic to everyday reality. Nevertheless, the reader does not perceive the unexplainable as an intrusion into the reality of the text but is led rather to accept the supernatural without blinking, so to speak, just as the narrator and the other characters do. For example, similarly to Carpentier’s Macandal, Tituba is capable of metamorphosing into other life forms: “[Mama Yaya] taught me how to change myself into a bird on a branch, into an insect in the dry grass or a frog croaking in the mud of the River Ormond whenever I was tired of the shape I had been given at birth” (10). This power and the one of foretelling the future Tituba will be reluctant to resort to because she cares more about living in the present and making the most out of enjoying her body—propensities that will eventually collide with the Massachusetts Puritans’ convictions and lifestyle. Tituba absorbs Mama Yaya’s animism and literally founds her life on its ideas and practices: among them, communication, and more importantly communion, with the dead will prove to be the most significant: …Mama Yaya initiated me into the upper spheres of knowledge. The dead only die if they die in our hearts. They live on if we cherish them and honor their memory, if we place their favorite delicacies in life on their graves, and if we kneel down regularly to commune with them. They are all around us, eager for attention, eager for affection. (10)

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Later on, mostly in the critical points of the narrative, Tituba will often commune with her dead loved ones—Abena, Yao, Mama Yaya, and others—and will be able to communicate with the other dead whenever she wants or is asked to (e.g., by her Jewish master and lover, Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo, who, in an ongoing state of mourning, is still longing for his late wife and children). Critics have recently pointed out that mourning in Tituba’s case is altogether different from the process of reaching “closure” described by Freud and prevalent in Western culture. “For Tituba, the portal of death is opened through the affective work of remembering and cherishing the deceased, and mourning is conceived not so much as either a Freudian or a Puritanical laying the dead to rest, but as a reinvestment and completion of a relation begun in life” (Jaji 64). In the ontological structure of Condé’s novel, the uniqueness of the protagonist’s mourning goes beyond the dichotomies of life and afterlife, natural and supernatural, reality and dream: the act of mourning translates into ways of coping with transgenerational trauma and of bearing witness to historical trauma. As in many novels by Caribbean women writers, mourning is presented “as a process, a relevant, essential, and productive event with the power to memorialize and immortalize the dead and those who have been forgotten or purposely erased from history” (Harte 2). In a context in which mourning occurs both as an act of working through traumata of loss and as an act of bearing witness to that loss, “writing becomes a militant act, a way of recovering unwritten, untold history” (Harte 5–6). Furthermore, in light of the present study, I posit that the nexus between a chronotope of massive loss, such as slavery, and its artistic correspondent comes about through the writers’ traumatic imagination and the readers’ capacity for empathy; the artistic chronotope may be considered as accomplished only when its underlying narrative mode, such as magical realism, manages to create a simulacrum of the unspeakable and to convey to readers what I have called a felt reality. Thus, Condé not only acts as transhistorical amanuensis of sorts by bearing witness to Tituba’s plight, “but also presents her readers with the opportunity of bearing witness to a suppressed history in reading, literally viewing, the account. This overlap between the visual

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acts of witnessing an event and reading a text is crucial to the collective dimension of Condé’s literary working through the traumas of Tituba’s life…” (Jaji 68). The main character’s death at the end of the novel will not mark the end but the beginning of her story, which will perpetually unfold with each act of reading. After Mama Yaya’s death (i.e., her physical but not spiritual disappearance), Tituba lives a relatively free life, occasionally helping other slaves, healing their wounds, and dispensing advice and encouragement until the day she meets a handsome slave, John Indian. While it seems that Tituba honestly falls in love with him, it will eventually turn out that her attraction to him has been due more to lust than to affection. Tituba’s unselfish surrender to John Indian culminates with her marrying him even though it implies becoming a slave again. Finding herself once again at the mercy of several consecutive slave owners, constantly susceptible to being sold, bought, and moved to unpredictable locations, Tituba eventually ends up in North America, in Salem Village, as property of Reverend Samuel Parris. Her odyssey—along which she never ceases to assert her strength of character, natural goodness, and love for her fellow human beings at every step of the way—is marred by more violence and traumatizing events. Violence and magic are ubiquitous ingredients in Condé’s narrative; they both challenge the readers’ imagination, and appeal to their strongest emotions. Images of physical violence suggesting unspeakable pain and images portraying unexplainable events meet on the literary playing field of the extraordinary—ultimately, an extraordinary that surreptitiously enters the everyday and undermines its stability and coherence, and whose affect can possibly and quite easily traumatize readers. Graphic descriptions of physical violence, instances of which I have also shown in Carpentier’s novel and in Bleby’s eyewitness account, may exert a traumatizing effect not only the characters but also on the readers of Condé’s text. The following images and scenes are particularly relevant in this sense: when summoned by Tituba for help, Mama Yaya’s spirit tells her about having comforted a slave “whose man died under torture. They whipped him. They rubbed hot pepper on his wounds and

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then they tore off his penis” (29); shortly after her arrival in Salem, Tituba witnesses the hanging of Goody Glover, which she describes in vivid visual and auditory details: “When we got closer, we saw an old woman with a rope around her neck. Suddenly one of the men removed the plank on which she was standing and her body snapped stiff as a bow. There was a terrible cry and her head fell to one side” (49) [the scene is particularly significant because it makes Tituba relive her mother’s execution in a traumatic flashback, almost literally, not as an adult but as a seven-year-old]; when she remembers baby killings, Tituba reactualizes a motif familiar to most readers from Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “Throughout my childhood I had seen slaves kill their babies by sticking a long thorn into the still viscous-like egg of their heads, by cutting the umbilical cord with a poison blade […]. Throughout my childhood I had heard slaves exchange formulas for potions, baths, and injections that sterilize the womb forever and turn it into a tomb lined with a scarlet shroud”; during the Salem witch trials, four Puritan men use extreme physical intimidation to make Tituba confess to her “crimes”: “One of the men sat squarely astride me and began to hammer my face with his fists, which were as hard as stones. Another lifted up my skirt and thrust a sharpened stick into the most sensitive part of my body, taunting me: ‘Go on, take it, it’s John Indian’s prick’ ” (91). Endowed with a questioning mind and certainly more intelligence than her husband John Indian, Tituba actually recognizes in the Puritans’ actions and beliefs symptoms of perpetrators’ trauma (even if she does not refer to them as such): “Perhaps it’s because they have done so much harm to their fellow beings, to some because their skin is black, to others because their skin is red, that they have such a strong feeling of being damned?” (47). The Puritans’ self-hatred might in fact originate from causes similar to those of Rhys’s Rochester, who also finds himself unable to relate, either rationally or emotionally, to the easy-goingness and the joie de vivre of the islanders. In the midst of all the pain and suffering that Tituba endures or witnesses, the magical element, mostly in the form of ghosts, brings her relief and guidance. The spirits of her dead loved ones visit and speak with Tituba as real-life beings; there is nothing spectral or frightening

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about Condé’s ghosts: any out-of-this-worldish traits are absent, and they interact with the main character/narrator, and implicitly with the reader, just as all the other living characters do. Some encounters even go beyond the visual and the auditory, and involve tactile contacts as well. While Tituba is using incantations to conjure up Abigail, her Jewish master’s deceased wife, she suddenly feels Hester’s lips on her neck (the adulteress who hanged herself in her cell). On another occasion, after returning from Salem and landing at Bridgetown, Tituba is welcomed by her beloved ghosts, “Mama Yaya, the tall Nago Negress with sparkling teeth. Abena, my mother, the Ashanti princess with her jetblack skin and ritual scarifications. Yao, the silk-cotton tree with large, powerful feet. I cannot describe my feelings while they hugged me” (141). While the plausibility of the text is certainly undermined by the intrusion of the dead, their presence, nevertheless, confers the narrative a tone of optimism and confidence in the triumph of human goodness. As pointed out by Parkinson Zamora, “[M]agical realist texts universalize the individual self, a strategy that goes a long way in explaining the presence of so many ghosts in magical realist texts” (498). Ghosts may also function as a reminder that our known universe has more depth to it than, literally, meets the eye, whereas, literarily, they maintain the doubleness of the text’s ontological structure, the magic (the unexplainable) in the midst of reality (arguably conceived as the exclusive realm of the explainable). According to Scott Simpkins, “Within this arena of uncertainty, magic realism demonstrates its hopeful scheme to supplement the realistic text through a corrective gesture, a means to overcome the insufficiencies of realism” (Simpkins 153). Even if a “corrective gesture” is meant to enhance reality, it is not supposed, at the same time, to completely suspend the readers’ disbelief toward the magical element. Postmodernist fiction needs to keep readers aware of the artificial nature of the text because they are both consumers and producers of the literary image, readers and scriptors (Barthes), seducers and seduced (BenítezRojo). Magical realism reveals both its artificiality (its literariness) and its literality, and deliberately turns the reader into an accomplice through the acts of reading and imagining.

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There are several instances in Condé’s narrative where the text becomes a commentary on itself, a characteristically postmodernist metafiction. For example, Tituba-the-first-person-narrator, whose voice comes from beyond the grave, so to speak, interrupts the narrative now and again to express her concern about the survival of Tituba-the-historical-realeme because she knows that the “official” documents of the Salem witch trials will never be able to do her justice: “There would be mention here and there of ‘a slave originating from the West Indies and probably practicing “hoodoo.”’ There would be no mention of my age or my personality. I would be ignored. […] Tituba would be ignored forever! There would never, ever, be a careful, sensitive biography re-creating my life and its suffering” (110). Only Tituba-the-fictional-character will ever be able to save Tituba-the-historical-realeme from being forgotten. Behind the first-person narrative voice speaking about itself in the third person, readers may of course infer the presence of the implied author: it is in fact Condé who reflects here on the role of fiction to reconstruct history, to create a “sensory” biography, or what I have called a felt reality. In another critic’s view, “The postmodernists fictionalize history, but by doing so they imply that history itself may be a form of fiction” (McHale 96). Moreover, in other instances, when the narrator directly addresses the reader—“The reader may be surprised that…” (156)—she forecloses any possibility for the reader’s suspension of disbelief toward the fictional world: paradoxically, the reader is deliberately invited to approach the text with an attitude of disbelief and to participate in the re-creation of reality. Postmodernist fiction in general, and magical realist writing in particular, rely heavily on this textualization of the reader as one of their basic narrative strategies. The deliberate address and implication of the reader, especially in the case of trauma narratives, bear close resemblance to the psychoanalytical phenomenon of transference: while trying to work through trauma by telling, the traumatized narrator/ character is quite likely to induce the reader’s (the “analyst’s”) vicarious traumatization: “Do I have to go on to the end?” a trauma-weary narrator interpellates the reader. “Hasn’t the reader already guessed what is going to happen? So predictable, so easily predictable! And then by telling it,

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I shall be reliving my suffering over and over again. And must I suffer twice?” (175). Tituba-the-first-person-narrator is seemingly aware of the dangers residing in telling, in revisiting the original event(s) that caused trauma in the first place. Working through trauma is a painful and forever unfinished process. Moreover, trauma lives on even after the primary victim’s death: either through the immediate, vicariously traumatized audience (listener, analyst, historian, author, reader, or viewer) or through the more remote and dispersed phenomenon of transgenerational trauma. When Tituba ends her story, she knows that another story, an endless one, is about to start: “And that is the story of my life. Such a bitter, bitter story. My real story starts where this one leaves off and it has no end” (175). Tituba’s “real” story will keep on being told over and over again by coming generations of authors and readers: each rewriting or reading of the novel will work as a new utterance, with new meanings, and different degrees of emotions attached to it. Following in Yao’s footsteps, who called the eventual defendant of the Salem witch trials into being by naming her, readers will keep her and her traumatic experiences alive in their memories and imaginations. Paradoxically, it seems that the historical records on which Condé built her novel had in their turn been based more on interpretations of the events than on bare facts. In this respect, Bernard Rosenthal notes that In the enormous quantity of data available for examining the Salem witch trials—in all the court records, in all pretrial and trial testimony (contrary to what various historians claim, some trial records did survive), in all the contemporary accounts of what happened—not a single person suggests that Tituba told stories of witchcraft or voodoo. Not one person hints at it or says anything that could be misconstrued to imply it. (Rosenthal 14)

What is important in Tituba’s story, however, is the Caribbean identity that the text fleshes out around the chronotope of slavery. By its violent nature, this shock chronotope prevented its victims’ voices from being heard for almost two centuries, and thus foregrounded the need

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for reconstituting their lost identity. However, the traumatic imagination of authors such as Condé has made working through the trauma caused by a historical loss possible maybe for the first time. If Condé rewrites the past, she only does so with the present in mind. By her own admission, she resents being stuck in the rut of eternal remembering; however, one needs the past to find one’s way in the present and to anticipate the future. In an interview with Ann Armstrong Scarboro (in Afterword to Tituba), Condé modestly acknowledges that she is “not involved in any kind of scholarly research”; however, she does admit that her imagination is based on history: “I am just a dreamer—my dreams rest upon a historical basis. Being a black person, having a certain past, having a certain history behind me, I want to explore that realm and of course I do it with my imagination and with my intuition” (Condé 201). One cannot explore a two-hundred-year-old past without reading about it, or researching it in any scholarly or non-scholarly way. An author necessarily needs those already semioticized objects that McHale calls realemes; only by using historical realemes and their corresponding chronotope can the author create an artistic chronotope, a felt reality that will flesh out a historical referent in the literary text. It is also true that such an undertaking never sets history exclusively as its main purpose. Condé considers writing a search for one’s identity: “For a black person from the West Indies or from Africa […] it is a kind of challenge to find out exactly what was there before. It is not history for the sake of history. It is searching for one’s self, searching for one’s identity, searching for one’s origin in order to better understand oneself” (Condé 203–204). It is an understanding whose ultimate condition may be one’s ability to cope with—and write—trauma. * Surviving slavery, or any other shock chronotope for that matter, ultimately means keeping alive the “real” story long after the initial one has consumed itself. The real story is the one that succeeds in recreating past traumatic events by attaching them to present affects and

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making them matter to the modern consciousness. The ongoing story of violent histories may thus function as the framework for an intercultural dynamic that Michael Rothberg has recently called “multidirectional memory,” as opposed to competitive memory, the framework in which the remembrance of one violent history overshadows another (3). Therefore, remembering the horrors of the past amounts in fact to much more than paying homage to the memory of the victims and showing deference to the survivors: it is also an act of confronting the unspeakable, of coming to terms with historical trauma, and of finding a viable way to live with it after having appropriated its moral lessons. The magical element in the magical realist writing mode functions as a Trojan horse in penetrating the defenses of the real, of the hole in signification that trauma has caused. In the case of slavery, it means compensating for a historical loss of identity by supplanting it with affective simulacra. ***

CHAPTER 5

“HANDCUFFED TO HISTORY” SURVIVING COLONIALISM

Not only connected to history, but handcuffed to it: that is how Saleem Sinai, the narrator and protagonist in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1980), presents himself—and constantly insists that readers believe him—while attempting to understand his identity through several plot twists. In Rushdie’s postmodern fictional reconstruction of history, Saleem’s birth at the midnight of August 15, 1947, is not simply coincidental with the beginning of India’s independence: by an ironic shift of perspective and the participation of a number of supernatural factors, it is actually modern India that is born with Saleem and eventually affected by his and the other 581 midnight’s children’s whims. The humorous allusions and the relentless satire seem to emanate simultaneously from the implied author’s imaginative perspective and his narrator’s skewed attitude toward history. However, by the end of the novel, after having portrayed himself as an agent of history, Saleem ends up as just another object, as one of its millions of victims. Saleem’s handcuffing to India’s history suggests precisely this lack of agency and, on a larger scale, the

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submission of the postcolonial subject to a situation that he has not chosen nor can control. If Saleem believes, and wants to make readers believe, that he is the one determining the course of the new nation (in itself a contentious concept throughout the narrative), it is because he enacts a scenario analogous to Freud’s fort da game, that is, he displays a compulsion to repeat unpleasant events (“incidentally,” easily recognizable historical ones) in order to gain control over them post facto. Through his narrative, Saleem tries to work through individual trauma; however, on a subconscious level, Saleem is acting out historical trauma. Over the past decade, literary critics and cultural theorists have analyzed colonization “in terms of the infliction of a collective trauma” and approached “postcolonialism as a post-traumatic cultural formation” (Buelens and Craps 2). It is in such a post-traumatic cultural formation that Rushdie wrote his novel. Nevertheless, representing postcolonial trauma is not limited to the literature of the former colonial center—as in Rushdie’s case, England: the former colonized have proved to be just as resourceful in using magical realism in order to “write back” against the hegemonic cultural practices of the Center–as in the case of Latin American authors writing about the violent heritage of the Spanish conquistadores or the brutal practices of neocolonialism. The workings of the traumatic imagination in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), a structurally complex and linguistically colorful literary attempt at reconstructing a shock chronotope, are analogous to those that have led to the inception of Rushdie’s novel. García Márquez’s third-person narrator Melquíades (revealed as such only in the last pages of the novel) tries to rewrite history—as will thirteen years later Rushdie’s first-person narrator Saleem—not as a palimpsest, by writing over previous layers of text, but as an apocrypha, by creating new myths on a clean slate. Neither Melquíades nor Saleem will succeed because their creators carefully avoid ending their stories on an optimistic note, which they fear might leave readers with the false impression that history can be corrected by rewriting it. From this perspective, “[One Hundred Years of Solitude] is a story about the failure of a dream; […] The desire to remake the world from the beginning, to

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found a new identity […] and to found it in freedom, divorced from all contaminating or degrading influences, is a compelling fantasy” (Minta 179). The apocalyptic whirlwind that destroys Melquíades’s parchment on the last page of One Hundred Years of Solitude will be mirrored in Midnight’s Children by the also religiously symbolic disintegration of Saleem’s body, the entity, the consciousness, the voice that has failed to reconstruct history—as if through a reversed transubstantiation of sorts. The fact that “races condemned to one hundred years of solitude [do] not have a second opportunity on earth” (García Márquez 336) may be due, after all, to their tragic flaws, hubris, and unfortunate inclination toward excesses and transgressions of universal laws, particularly the ones sanctifying life. If Rushdie’s Saleem is handcuffed to India’s postcolonial history, García Márquez’s Buendía family is tragically unable to escape Latin America’s heritage of violence. * When the Spanish first landed on what they thought to be the eastern shores of the Indian subcontinent, they behaved not so much as colonizers but as conquerors—and they conquered by inflicting death on a mass scale. The demographic, economic, and social impacts were so severe that the legacy of la conquista seems to live on even in our times: When the Spanish arrived on the island of Hispaniola in the late fifteenth century, the indigenous population numbered a quarter of a million people. Forty years later, their numbers had been reduced to fewer than five hundred, largely through torture and forced labour, while today, in Haiti, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic, people are old at forty, almost 80 per cent of the population is illiterate, and the overwhelming majority earn less than $150 a year. (Minta 179)

The historical trauma caused by a violence of such amplitude has never been fully addressed in any scientific or artistic discourse, let alone officially acknowledged: hence its insistence, its constant return through different behavioral syndromes on individual and social levels.

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The Spanish had apparently been unable to come to terms with their past even before they came to the New World. Their numerous wars and defeats in the Old World had only boosted their desire to heal their wounded pride and self-esteem, and America finally gave them the long-sought opportunity to do so—however, not by avoiding the violence that had plagued their European history but, on the contrary, by repeating it in the hope of a more favorable outcome. Thus, the Spanish came to the Indies first and foremost as conquistadores: “The term is significant and it was he [the Spanish] who first applied it to himself as an honorific term. He never dreamed of calling himself a colonizador. […] The role of the colonizer was thrust on him and the attitude he took towards it—his predominant attitude indeed towards everybody and everything except his God, his King and his honour— was one of egregious arrogance” (Vivas 5–6). This attitude might at least partially explain Latin America’s oppressive regimes, dysfunctional societies, and ongoing violence in modern times. Even admitting that the general perception of sociopolitical chaos and large-scale violence originates both in reality and in the hyperreality created by the sensationalist visual media,72 one can hardly ignore—or downplay for the sake of political correctness—the quite obvious legacy of violence from Spanish colonial times. Secondary witnesses of Latin American violence, news consumers from North America, or from anywhere in the world for that matter, sooner or later come to realize the shallowness of the reality that constitutes the Latin American news “story.” What always seems to be missing is the why, the reason, the human background of the reported events. Therefore, a fact that Latin Americans themselves admit is that “to tell the truth about Latin America, a writer must lie. The truest records of Latin American life are novels. It is only through fiction or, second best, in true stories about people that a writer can present not just an event but the world surrounding it that endows it with meaning” (Rosenberg 12). However, the Latin American writer, any writer, will always have to struggle with questions such as, what is it that makes a story true? Or how can one pour meaning into events that defy human understanding and normal

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feelings? While others are inclined to explain the violence committed by impeccable members of a community—by “solid” citizens with unblemished records of familial, professional, and social interaction—to a dysfunctional society (“One need not be pathological to do horrible things. The pathology, then, belongs to society” [Rosenberg 18–19]), I attribute the root cause of excessive aggressiveness to the “darkness” (Conrad) palpitating in every consciousness, regardless of the social conditions that have molded it, and which usually needs only a small window of opportunity to unleash its destructive powers. Only if and when individual responsibility is abolished does a society in its turn succumb to a general illness: only if its originally random and isolated ills are tolerated does an entire society become pathological. Significantly, the contagion of violence may overtake a society either within one or over several generations. Particularly in the case of Latin America—but not exclusively (its example is particularly significant because it stretches over modern times and to the present day)—the main culprit for its present state of sociopolitical dysfunction and rampant violence is history, the history created by the Spanish conquerors and colonizers. “Most of Latin America was conquered and colonized through violence, setting up political and economic relationships based on power, not law. These relationships still exist today […]. The conquest was most brutal in the richest lands, especially those of the great Indian civilizations that offered the Spanish gold and slaves” (Rosenberg 18–19). Although Colombia was only moderately rich in natural resources, the particularly brutal oppression of its indigenous population initiated a culture of violence that has been plaguing its history ever since. Not only the number of civil wars—seventy on record between 1819 and 1902—but also the disproportion between the trivial causes for violence and the extent of the killings attest to this historical heritage and the presence of an incontrollable “need aggression” (Hagen 92–93). In more recent history, roughly between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, Colombia was hit by a wave of violence that swept over most of its territory (only the border regions remained more or less untouched by it) and affected almost every segment of the population

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and every institution; “it was so widespread and pervasive that the most appropriate name Colombians found for it was generic: the Violence. […] Careful estimates indicate 135,000 deaths from the violence between 1949 and 1958” (Weinert 311). A violence of such proportion may have a traumatic effect not only on primary witnesses and survivors but also on secondary witnesses living in the same social environment, most of whom are likely to feel like potential victims themselves. Trauma can emerge as much from the experience of sudden violent events as from a prolonged state of anxiety. Although anxiety, as a continual state of fear, is usually meant to anticipate fright, its other effects are resignation toward and tacit acceptance of its causes, which may include a general and seemingly endless climate of violence. The resulting psychic numbing is one of the basic symptoms of major trauma. A general state of resignation at a macro-social level conveniently plays into the hands of the powers that be, which can thus exploit it to strengthen their political advantage even further. For example, Daniel Pécaut attributes the ongoing banality of violence in modern-day Colombia to the official attempt to rewrite history by shifting the blame onto the victims of violence themselves—the working class and the peasantry. The official account of the events relegated the victims’ experiences to an “ ‘infrahistory,’ a hidden history never able to be openly expressed” (Pécaut 161).73 The foreclosure of a collective memory that would normally lead to healing and coming to terms with the horrors of the past tends to be replaced by a myth-creating process. Besides the ongoing opposition to the two main political parties and the accounts of different individuals, “the third kind of memory of the period [of la violencia] is through a mythical reworking of its significance, which is the only way that shared experiences can ever take shape. The victims, in this sense, emphasize the continuity of the violence, which they claim has ‘always existed’ ” (Pécaut 161–162).74 What happens with traumatic memories at the collective level of the subconscious could then also account for their literary reconstruction in magical realist writing. Regardless of their occasional (and sometimes only apparent) social isolation, authors are, after all, witnesses of one chronotope or another just as any other character that they

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create in their works. The traumatic imagination is not only a privilege of the creative mind but also a common reaction of the psyche confronted with memories of extreme events. Ever since their country gained independence from Spain in 1819, Colombians have probably had the largest share of extreme events of all Latin American nations. Some critics even qualify Colombia’s political violence as “[p]erhaps the single most important aspect of [its modern] history” (Minta 5). Therefore, it is not surprising that death be the central theme of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude—with a clear distinction, however, between the slow, natural kind and the violently induced one. Even natural death can both stimulate a sense of belonging (and thus found a community) and destroy an individual when experienced in solitude. Indeed, when José Arcadio Buendía plans to leave the still young village of Macondo to continue his explorations, his wife Úrsula opposes his decision by bringing up the recent birth of their first son: “We will not leave here, because we have had a son here.” Her argument cannot convince José Arcadio Buendía, who replies, “We have still had not had a death. […] A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.” Unshaken in her beliefs, Úrsula shows herself willing to die if that were the condition to keep all settlers in Macondo (19). On the other hand, Melquíades returns from the dead “because he could not bear the solitude,” and takes refuge in Macondo, “in that corner of the world which had still not been discovered by death.” However, his faithfulness to life will cost him the loss of all his supernatural faculties (47). Ironically, the first death in Macondo is violent: José Arcadio Buendía pierces the throat of Prudencio Aguilar with a spear, after Prudencio makes an unflattering allusion to his manhood at a cockfight. After Melquíades’s second death, José Arcadio Buendía becomes emotionally unstable and gradually loses his grip on reality. Finally, after the massacre of more than three thousand striking workers of the banana company later in the novel, the undoing of Macondo, both physical and social, becomes irreversible. Unlike Alejo Carpentier, Jean Rhys, and Maryse Condé, who re-create a shock chronotope (Caribbean slavery) preceding their own by almost

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two centuries, García Márquez has actually lived in the chronotope that has inspired his novel, the Colombian period of la violencia and its political aftermath; at the same time, as most historians seem to agree, la violencia erupted, in its turn, as the consequence of another shock chronotope—Spanish colonialism. Nevertheless, just like Carpentier, Rhys, and Condé, García Márquez has not experienced any of the traumatic events re-presented in One Hundred Years of Solitude directly. Consequently, his secondary witnessing (and possibly vicariously induced trauma) has catalyzed the traumatic imagination that had also inspired other Caribbean writers to re-create histories of violence in their fictions. Different from simple journalistic reporting (even though he used to earn his bread and butter by it), García Márquez’s bearing witness to a Colombian-cum-Latin-American shock chronotope stands as proof for at least a couple of facts: first, that secondary witnessing may sometimes turn into a morally responsible act of bearing witness; and second, that bearing witness, through artistic representation or direct testimony, is also, more often than not, a politically responsible act, needed to correct official versions of history. As Christopher Warnes also notes, “García Márquez approaches history with an anguished awareness that positivistic and official historiography is woefully inadequate to understanding the bloody history of Colombia” (90–91). García Márquez has witnessed the Colombian postcolonial chronotope and its violence not as a victim, nor even firsthand, but through its collective ripple effects and the media. According to biographers and critics, on April 9, 1948, when the Liberal politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was assassinated, García Márquez was a law student at the National University in Bogotá. The immediate result of the assassination was “the bogotazo, the bloody uprising that raged for several days within Bogotá,” followed by “what has become known as la violencia, a brutal civil war between conservatives and liberals that lasted into the 1960s, causing the deaths of several hundred thousand Colombians” (McMurray 21). However, after the closing of the university, García Márquez went first to Barranquilla, in the Caribbean region, and then to Cartagena to continue his studies; consequently, during the worst years of la violencia, he enjoyed the

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“relative peace of the Caribbean coastal region” (Minta 40). The author’s secondhand witnessing and vicarious traumatization seem to have found expression in the frequent allusions to death through unnatural signs or persistent smells in One Hundred Years of Solitude. After José Arcadio, Úrsula’s second son, is shot in his bedroom— significantly, the shooter, the subject causing violent death, will remain unknown—a trickle of blood comes out under the door and travels through the entire village until it reaches Úrsula’s kitchen. As one of several occurrences in the novel that flagrantly contradict the natural laws of physics, the trail of blood might suggest the far-reaching effect of a violent event even when experienced from a distance—just as in the author’s case, who witnessed la violencia indirectly, far away from the capital, Bogotá. The unexplainable absence of any wound on José Arcadio’s body (the blood flows out of his right ear)—or of any murder weapon, for that matter—represents, in my view, the lack of concrete details that usually characterizes a traumatic memory. Paradoxically, the sign that does survive José Arcadio’s death is the smell of gunpowder that fills the bedroom, and is impossible to remove from the corpse—yet another symbol of the invisibility and persistence of a traumatic symptom. The ridiculously exaggerated and compulsively repeated attempts at getting rid of the choking smell of gunpowder (washing with soap, scrubbing with a brush, and rubbing with salt and vinegar) also account for the futility of fighting trauma by conventional—and solely physical— methods. Even after the grave is reinforced with walls, the cemetery will still smell of gunpowder for years (114). Later in the novel, the suffocating odor of Remedios the Beauty, an exceptionally attractive great-granddaughter of Úrsula, will impregnate the corpse of an unfortunate admirer who falls through the roof of her bathroom and cracks his skull on the cement floor. The narrator’s conclusion is that “the smell of Remedios the Beauty kept on torturing men beyond death” (193). The obvious difference between the smell of gunpowder and that of perfume notwithstanding, what characterizes both olfactory details is the feeling of suffocation, of succumbing to an invisible power—just as one might feel overpowered by an insistent symptom of trauma. Likewise, while

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the smell of gunpowder on José Arcadio Buendía’s body and the smell of perfume in the blood of Remedios’s admirer are suffocating, the rain of “tiny little flowers” that follows the death of the older José Arcadio Buendía (the shooting victim’s father) “covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors” (120, emphasis added). These sensory details and the vivid images projected by them convey the idea that death can impact the lives of its survivors/witnesses to such an extent that they come to perceive it as a lingering guest, as a persistent and ominous presence, a subconscious reminder that someday it will be their turn to experience it first-hand. Not all magical realist sequences in One Hundred Years of Solitude are death related—which does not mean that the reality they re-create is any less terrifying. The magical realist author’s main, and probably most challenging, goal is to create verisimilitude and to compel readers into taking all the extraordinary events in the narrative in their stride; it is a goal shared with most authors, for that matter, but in the case of magical realism, the text’s self-irony deliberately prevents its own realization as a plausible image. García Márquez once said that “it’s possible to get away with anything as long as you make it believable. That is something my grandmother taught me” (quoted in Minta 37). The message of the anecdote is twofold: first, the grandmother must have been a reliable storyteller (narrator/performer), just as magical realist authors tend to be; and second, readers should approach a magical realist narrative with the same candor and open-mindedness as the young García Márquez did or any other child listening to a story would—with one significant difference, though: unlike children, readers are expected to keep aware of the deceiving lightness of the story. Achieving believability—that phenomenal trait of an event or character which spurs the impression, or even the conviction, that the reality of the story is a truthful rendition of the “real” reality—while simultaneously exaggerating the contours and exposing the mysterious elements of the real might well be the ultimate feat of García Márquez’s literary craft, or any writer’s for that matter. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the subtlety and the conspicuousness of certain supernatural phenomena seem to alternate according to

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their significance in the development of the plot. Thus, according to the stories of the gypsies who once in a while visit Macondo, west of the village there is a “boundless extension of water [with] soft-skinned cetaceans that [have] the head and torso of a woman, causing the ruination of sailors with the charm of their extraordinary breasts” (16). The insertion of anthropomorphic details into the description of an otherwise common natural habitat lends the image an air of awe and mystery—which the landscape could actually have revealed to its real beholders at some point. Lois Parkinson Zamora attributes such descriptive instances to the “visualizing capacity” of magical realism, which, according to the critic, “create (magical) meanings by envisioning ordinary things in extraordinary ways” (“Swords and Silver Rings” 31). In another instance, during Úrsula Buendía’s five-month disappearance from Macondo, “strange things” start happening, as if her disappearance had cancelled the natural laws of physics: an empty flask becomes so heavy that it cannot be moved, water in a pan boils without any fire, and a basket starts moving about a room by itself (36). One cannot overlook the similarity between these strange phenomena happening in the absence of Úrsula, that is, of a character that holds together an entire community, and the unnatural occurrences observed by the slaves during the marronage of Macandal, another socially unifying character, in Carpentier’s The Kingdom of this World. In both works, the implied message is that normalcy and the stability of a community might sometimes paradoxically depend on its “special” members or outcasts. And yet, probably the most conspicuous images of extraordinary phenomena are the ones in which characters defy the laws of gravity. For example, Father Nicanor can levitate (similarly to a guru, another spiritual character, in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children) each time he drinks hot chocolate. The minute details (“thick and steaming chocolate,” “six inches above the ground,” etc.) convincingly depict a quite realistic situation—were it not for the levitation part—so readers feel prompted to move on without batting an eyelid. After all, Father Nicanor’s demonstrations of levitation are meant to collect money for the practical purpose of building a church (74). From levitation to flying there is just one single step: Remedios the Beauty,

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Úrsula’s great-granddaughter, rises to heaven on a wind blowing through the Brabant sheets that she is about to fold in the garden. Ironically, the women in the house not only accept the miracle but also pray to God to send them back the sheets (195). José Arcadio Buendía’s reaction is just as casual when a flying carpet driven by a gypsy and carrying several children from the village goes by his window (33). However, his comment, “Let them dream,” projects the reader into two realities: the narrator’s, who shows the children as flying, and the character’s (José Arcadio), who knows that they are dreaming. The scene thus textualizes the reader by forcing him/her to choose one interpretation or another, or to assume the role of an unreliable witness. One of the few exceptions to the unexplained nature of magical events is the image of an “angelic force” that lifts into the air the children who are about to play a prank on Aureliano (the last Buendía) and destroy Melquíades’s parchments in the end of the novel (300); and yet, the religious connotation does not seem to play any other role than that of a supernatural cause. In all these instances of levitation or flying, more important than causes is the fact that the law of gravitation, just as any other physical law for that matter, is breakable. Occasionally, the psychological and the physical nature of some characters can also become a source of extraordinary phenomena. For example, six-year-old Aureliano, the Buendías’ first son (“the first human being to be born in Macondo”), shows early signs of extra-sensory perception (ESP) when he predicts that a pot of boiling soup is going to spill. However, his clairvoyance is dubious, at best: even though his mother, Úrsula, has put the pot right in the middle of the table, it starts moving toward the edge only after the child’s announcement, and finally falls, and breaks on the floor (20). Therefore, if it is a telekinetic gift, it could also be the harbinger of a strong-minded and much-feared Colonel Aureliano Buendía and his eventual shake-up of the political landscape of the country. As far as physical transformations go, similarly to Condé’s ghosts in Tituba, García Márquez’s dead characters return among the living not as holographic apparitions but as flesh-and-blood creatures who interact with those whom they love and miss: Prudencio Aguilar, killed by José Arcadio Buendía over an insult to his manhood, visits his

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enemy because he has ended up loving him (70). In another instance, Aureliano Segundo (the third generation of Buendías) recognizes the ghost of Melquíades “because that hereditary memory had been transmitted from generation to generation and had come to him through the memory of his grandfather” (154). Here again, the ghost interacts with the living character and behaves as if this world and the afterworld were one. However, interestingly enough, just as in Tituba’s case, the ghost’s presence is perceivable by one character only—usually the one more predisposed toward contemplation, introspection, and intellectual activity. “Hereditary memory” can survive, after all, only if one’s ancestors’ past is endowed with some kind of meaning that needs to be kept alive and carried on. Far from being reality, flying carpets and ghosts may still signify the real (the world of constructs) and attach a meaning to it—particularly when remembering means coping with a heritage of extreme pain and suffering. As a subset of fantasy, magical realist writing is not only (nor foremost) fantasy: García Márquez has often underscored the importance of credibility to most Latin American authors, whose goal is to make their audiences realize that “the sense of wonder and infinite strangeness which emerges from much Latin American writing is a true reflection of the complex realities of Latin American experience, not merely the product of a feverish, literary imagination” (Minta 37). By imagining Macondo, García Márquez actually re-creates Latin America or, at least, the parts of it that he knows best, including its history of violence. Indeed, according to Carlos Fuentes, America was invented by naming rather than discovered: “America is a name. A name discovered. A name invented. A name desired. […] We must believe that, first of all, it was desired and then imagined” (Fuentes 3). It was nothing but the sheer newness of the New World, its terrifying vastness, strangeness, and appealing unreachability that must have bred the desire to imagine and name it. Whenever reality cannot be conquered by reason, it needs to be (re)-imagined by words.75 Other critics, such as Warnes, have pointed out that magical realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude “comes to mark an engagement with discourse about reality, rather than [with] reality

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itself” (96). The novel does not raise questions so much about reality as it does about its historical and literary representations. Thus, the story of an imaginary village (Macondo) and one of its founding families (the Buendías), re-creates about 120 or 150 years of postcolonial (including neocolonial) Colombian history, and is meant to convince readers that they “cannot feel satisfied with the official, documented history of the times: that history is also all the things that men and women have dreamed, imagined, desired, and named” (Fuentes 11). However, quite early in the narrative, when the people of Macondo have just started to forge a new community, history, and identity for themselves and their descendants, they come dangerously close to losing exactly the key preservative of that identity: memory. When the insomnia plague starts taking over the inhabitants of Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía, the head of one of the founding families, welcomes it as a way to “get more out of life,” enthralled as he is in his experiments and miscellaneous intellectual pursuits. The only one who recognizes the seriousness of the disease is an Indian woman, Visitación, who warns José Arcadio Buendía that the worst manifestation of it is not sleeplessness but the loss of memory. The narrator is careful to explain that [s]he meant that when the sick person became used to his state of vigil, the recollection of his childhood began to be erased from his memory, then the name and notion of things, and finally the identity of people and even the awareness of his own being, until he sank into a kind of idiocy that had no past. (43)

The message embedded in this instance of the narrative is quite unequivocal: it is exactly in one’s obsessive search for reality—and in one’s fixation on exhausting it with explanations—that dissociation from reality is most likely to occur. For one thing, a constant state of vigil forecloses almost all opportunities for dreaming—an activity of the mind taking place preponderantly during sleep (with the exception of daydreaming, of course)—and consequently impairs the workings of imagination, the key ingredient of remembering. Losing the “name and notion of

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things”—that is, the disappearance of signifiers (words) and signifieds (concepts)—might only lead to the Macondoans’ loss of identity; consequently, they start saving words and the practice of naming by using signs, by capturing them in writing. In the beginning, they write names of tools and animals on pieces of paper, which they eventually paste each onto its corresponding object. Then, in order to remember the functionality of each object, they start resorting to sentences: “This is the cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk, and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk” (46). By this primitive referencing and cross-referencing of names (words), the inhabitants of Macondo actually employ structural linguistics avant la lettre: they discover that the individual linguistic unit has no meaning of its own unless it is set in relationship and contrasted with other units and their own specific semantic load; moreover, the episode also suggests that each linguistic sign has only an arbitrary meaning, which makes it inadequate for memory—hence the need to physically label each real-life referent in order to make sure that the connection between sign and referent does not get lost. In a deliberate, metafictional commentary, the collective amnesia episode “calls into question the integrity of the novel’s narration and of its language. It shows the importance of writing as an antidote against forgetting, but simultaneously calls into question the relationship between words and things” (Warnes 89). As in many other instances, the intrusive philosopher/narrator draws the conclusion for the reader: “Thus, they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters” (46). In the initially anonymous narrator’s view of reality and writing (he will be revealed as Melquíades, the wandering gypsy, only in the last pages of the novel), I see theoretical traces of Jacques Ellul and Jean Baudrillard, two contemporary scholars of representation theory. Historical truth and legitimacy cannot come from images and be transmitted only through visual media: succinctly put, nothing can be real unless it is first signified and preserved in writing. As Fuentes also points out,

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Indeed, writing in general has the “magical” capacity of preserving the impalpable, elusive, and often illusory historical time in the tangible physicality of its signs (letters and words). However, diaries, letters, memoirs, and laws cannot record and transmit history with the same kind of immediacy and acuteness as fiction does—therefore, legitimacy might come not so much from “who owns the written papers” as from how they are written and by whom, an issue of rhetorical-vs.-artistic form discussed in the previous chapter. Moreover, legitimacy becomes questionable when it comes from “official” sources, from a politically and ideologically motivated history, particularly one which tends to cover up the horrors of the past in order to protect their perpetrators and/ or to pursue dubious political agendas. In the case of most Latin American countries, including García Márquez’s Colombia, political violence can be considered the most horrific heritage of Spanish colonial times. However, as far as the more recent causes of the violence are concerned, neocolonial practicesparticularly U.S. economic domination and political interference—have played a decisive role. Thus, Macondo’s take-over by the banana company in One Hundred Years of Solitude is in fact based on the establishing of the United Fruit Company in Colombia in the early twentieth century. Even the name of Macondo comes from a banana plantation between the villages of Guacamayal and Sevilla, not far from Aracataca, where García Márquez was born. According to Germán de Granda, the name might be of Bantu origin: “kondo,” plural “makondo,” means “banana” in the West-African language. “Germán de Granda notes that, within the cultural world of the Bantu, the fruit carries a range of magical and

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religious associations: it has the power to cure serious illnesses; it is, at the same time, the favourite food of the devil” (Minta 144). Considering the annihilating effect that the company will have on Macondo and its inhabitants, the irony implied in the etymology of the name becomes quite evident. The massacre of striking banana company workers is, according to many critics, the most important episode in the novel, historically based on an event that occurred on December 6, 1928, in Ciénaga, a city north of Aracataca. Significantly, George R. McMurray remarks that “in the novel the facts are never recorded as history, and the tragedy becomes imbedded in the mythical imagination” (73). I understand McMurray’s term “mythical imagination” as a collective version of the traumatic imagination: a community vaguely remembers, and so it mostly imagines that something horrible happened to an unknown number of its members at some point in the past (the number itself is too horrific to remember), but any attempt at remembering by telling about it has been foreclosed by trauma and the fear that it might happen again. Similarly to modern-day Colombia, the banalization of violence in the novel makes it acquire a mythical character. As myth, violence is perceived as a permanent and eternal presence: it has always been here, and will stay forever. One cannot question its existence: violence simply is. On the other hand, the traumatic imagination is a consciousness of survival, a deliberate, responsible, and courageous attempt to work through trauma by recovering and re-creating the original scenario that has caused it. Consequently, if the traumatic event (for which McMurray uses the word “tragedy” a little too loosely) has indeed become part of the community’s mythical imagination, it has been reconstructed and given meaning through the author’s empathy and traumatic imagination. The situation in Ciénaga started going downhill on the night of December 5, 1928, after General Carlos Cortés Vargas was informed that the government had declared a state of siege in the banana zone: in response, Cortés Vargas banned all meetings of more than three people. However, that same evening, a crowd of striking workers gathered in a square next to the railway station. When Cortés Vargas arrived in

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Ciénaga the next morning, he was accompanied by an army detachment. His decree was read out, and the crowd ordered to disperse. As the strikers refused to leave, Cortés Vargas ordered his soldiers to fire into the crowd, and an unknown number of people were killed. Months after the incident, violent skirmishes continued between strikers and company personnel, but were all brutally ended by the army. The final death toll also remains unknown (Minta 168–169). The silence of the witnesses was due as much to the traumatic impact of the event on their psyche as to the quite justified fear of becoming victims themselves. The Colombian government has never shown any genuine interest in finding out the truth and helping people come to terms with their past, which must have been one of the facilitating factors in the new upsurge in violence only two decades later. As long as it is denied meaning, particularly on a macro-social scale, the past will compulsively keep coming back in the form of traumatic memories, and prevent future healing: “This large-scale, collective repression of the past has potentially lethal consequences. For once you fail to admit the existence of something important in your past, you are close to denying the past any significance at all; and, from then on, it is easy to deprive the present and the future of all significance too” (Minta 170). An unacknowledged past is likely to block any future time-space (chronotope) from acquiring a meaning of its own simply because the lack in the chronotope, its entropy, will always carry an unsolved tension: thus, any future chronotope will be too “busy” with solving an inherited tension by repeating it instead of developing its own significance. According to Lacanian psychoanalysis, an event that has been denied existence (by preventing its remembering) cannot be forgotten: “that which does not exist, continues to insist, striving towards existence” (cf. Žižek). Concretely, in the case of the Ciénaga massacre, the accounts based on historical references (letters and reports) are too contradictory to carry the slightest ring of truth in them. A telegram from the head of the U.S. legation in Colombia to the U.S. secretary of state on December 16, 1928, reads: “ ‘I have the honor to report that the Bogotá representative of the United Fruit Company told me yesterday that the

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total number of strikers killed by the Colombian military exceed one thousand’ ” (Minta 171). At the same time, according to General Cortés Vargas, his troops killed “only” nine people when he ordered them to fire on the crowd. Numbers are simply meant to measure death (just as they do cosmic distances or economic output) and serve as statistics: granted they allude to human pain and suffering by quantifying them, numbers will never be able to evoke them, to make them felt up close and personal. Significantly, “for his part, García Márquez has frequently insisted that accuracy in this instance was never his primary consideration” (Minta 170). In re-creating the scene of the massacre, the narrator’s voice seems to shake and stutter, drifting between images of the factual and familiar, on the one hand, and of the imaginary and magical, on the other. As soon as the horrific event starts, time appears to stop in its tracks: …something happened that did not bring on fright but a kind of hallucination. The captain gave the order to fire and fourteen machine guns answered at once. But it all seemed like a farce. It was as if the machine guns had been loaded with caps, because their panting rattle could be heard and their incandescent spitting could be seen, but not the slightest reaction was perceived, not a cry, not even a sigh among the compact crowd that seemed petrified by an instantaneous invulnerability. (248–249)

The fragment reads like a cinematic freeze-frame: the machine guns could almost be visualized as toys provided by a special effects staff; fake bullets cannot hurt anybody. Everyone watches in silence the eerie spectacle of the massacre of a large mass of people and, at the same time, one’s own. José Arcadio Segundo has taken a child from the crowd onto his shoulders, trying to rescue him from imminent death, but at the same time inadvertently condemning him to a life of suffering and irreversible trauma. [The strikers] were penned in, swirling about in a gigantic whirlwind that little by little was being reduced to its epicentre as the edges were systematically being cut off all around like an onion

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THE TRAUMATIC IMAGINATION being peeled by the insatiable and methodical shears of the machine guns. The child saw a woman kneeling with her arms in the shape of a cross in an open space, mysteriously free of the stampede. José Arcadio Segundo put him up there at the moment he fell with his face bathed in blood, before the colossal troop wiped out the empty space, the kneeling woman, the light of the high, drought-stricken sky… (249)

In this deliberately understated scene of massive violence, a “whirlwind” and an “onion” might well be the only familiar and harmless images available linguistically when the mind is unable to grasp the horror of the real; or maybe they are elements of the real, after all, only converted into a more easily transmissible (and therefore more easily accessible) form. A more factual imagery (e.g., “human bodies were ripped apart by high-caliber bullets,” or “blood and brains splattered onto walls,” or “intestines spilled onto the pavement”) might have been stylistically more graphic and “realistic,” but its impact on the readers’ minds would not have been as deep and enduring as that of the magical realist image. The symbolism embedded in the image of the woman “with her arms in the shape of a cross in an open space” is self-explanatory: sacrifice (Christ’s image) has become meaningless amid so much horror. Admitting that “the massacre is made less brutal” (McMurray 98) through the use of metaphoric language, I think that the creation of a magical realist image, which places reality and imagination on contiguous planes (as opposed to overlapping ones), softens the violence only superficially. In fact, an understated image does not diminish the acuteness of the readers’ affect; on the contrary, it can have a deeper and longer-lasting impact on their minds than a more graphic one. However, I cannot agree that “the metaphoric language poetizes the tragic scene, creating sharp visual imagery characteristic of a surrealistic dream” (McMurray 98) for at least two reasons: first, there are no traces of either poetry (on the stylistic level) or tragedy (on the formal level) in García Márquez’s scene of the massacre; and second, the scene is by any analytical standards realistic rather than surrealistic. Magical realism is

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metonymical while surrealism is metaphorical: “magical realism may reveal a necessary relation of contiguity or correspondence between the everyday real and the imaginary, while surrealism would emphasize, similarly to the metaphor, the analogy between these terms in an attempt to realize their fusion” (Weisgerber 217). Indeed, everything in the massacre scene is real. To further build on Weisgerber’s point, I need to mention that prepositions such as “like” and “as if,” while setting up analogies between elements of reality (mass of people, machine-gun fire) and imagination (peeling onion, incandescent spitting), mostly serve as links between the two ontological levels of the text and place them on an equal footing. The massacre scene is neither imaginary nor surrealistic (let alone “poetic”): its imaginary elements do not replace but complete and intensify the violent reality of the mass killing. Of course, there is nothing new in such an aestheticization of horror; in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti already described killing by gunfire as follows: War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others…” (quoted by Benjamin 242)

Marinetti resorted to both metaphor (“flowery orchids” for machine-gun fire) and simile (“new architecture like that of the big tanks”) in order to intensify the reality of war. If Marinetti’s hyperbolized imagery is deliberately meant to shock readers, García Márquez’s is intended to keep them guessing and reliving the confusion of an extreme event that will be remembered but never fully understood. Remembering and its opposite, forgetting (or pretending not to remember), are crucial in creating significance around the massacre scene in One Hundred Years of Solitude. After the dead are loaded on

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railway cars and sent to an unknown destination, José Arcadio Segundo comes to, covered with blood, among a mass of human bodies: …the corpses had the same temperature as plaster in autumn and the same consistency of petrified foam that it had, and those who had put them in the [railway] car had had time to pile them up in the same way in which they transported bunches of bananas…[José Arcadio Segundo] saw the man corpses, woman corpses, child corpses who would be thrown into the sea like rejected bananas. (250)

The occurrence of “corpses” in the same sentence with “rejected bananas” produces a rupture in the discourse, a crisis of language. This moment of uncertainty marks the point of articulation between magical realism and that other version of realism which Michael Rothberg calls traumatic, that is, “a form of documentation and historical cognition attuned to the demands of extremity” (14). If magical realist language tries to bring extremity as close as possible to its textual witnesses (readers) by evoking it so that they might feel as re-living it, traumatic realism attempts to document extreme events down to the minutest detail and to communicate them as truthfully as possible. In García Márquez’s novel, the only survivors and witnesses of the massacre are José Arcadio Segundo and the child from the crowd whom he has carried on his shoulders. “Many years later that child would still tell, to the disbelief of all, that he had seen the lieutenant reading Decree No. 4 of the civil and military leader of the province through an old phonograph horn; […] he declared the strikers to be a ‘bunch of hoodlums’ and authorized the army to shoot to kill” (248). The omniscient narrator jumps to a remote future when people think of the child “as a crazy old man” (249), and the child has to recount the event “to the disbelief of all.” Purging himself of the trauma caused by the memory of the killing will prove an uphill battle because his witnessing to it will fall on deaf ears—either unbelieving or unwilling to listen, or both. The child’s predicament mirrors, in fact, that of the traumatized narrator (who also needs an audience, and whose word choice and narrative style indicate psychic numbing), and by extension, that of the vicariously traumatized author.

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The survivors’ painful struggle to remember and work through trauma is further worsened by the authorities’ flat denial of the horrific events. The only explanation and reassurance that the victims’ relatives will ever hear is, “ ‘You must have been dreaming. […] Nothing has happened in Macondo, nothing has ever happened, and nothing ever will happen. This is a happy town’ ” (252). Moreover, as proof that trauma can acquire artificial ramifications and be turned into a political weapon, the officers’ tactics of denial will eventually help them “wipe out the union leaders.” Unfortunately, it is not only the authorities’ distortion of the truth that stifles the survivors’ urge to tell, but also—and more importantly perhaps—the average people’s skepticism towards their story. When José Arcadio Segundo wanders into the kitchen of a stranger, he first has to spell his name in order to convince the woman that he is alive and not a ghost. However, making her believe his account of the massacre fails: ‘There must have been three thousand of them,’ he murmured. ‘What?’ ‘The dead,’ he clarified. ‘It must have been all of the people who were at the station.’ The woman measured him with a pitying look. ‘There haven’t been any dead here,’ she said. ‘Since the time of your uncle, the colonel, nothing has happened in Macondo.’ (251)

The survivor not only will find it impossible to bear witness to the horror of his experience but might also be marginalized by a society unwilling to listen to his story. Referring to Holocaust survivors, Dori Laub equates the impossibility of witnessing with the total annihilation of one’s identity: “This loss of the capacity to be a witness to oneself and thus to witness from the inside is perhaps the true meaning of annihilation, for when one’s history is abolished, one’s identity ceases to exist” (Laub 67). Conversely, provided there is an audience willing to listen, there always lurks the danger of the treacherous word that may easily distort the truth of the account in an otherwise bona fide attempt to rationalize it. “There are never enough words or the right words,” writes Laub, “there is never enough time or the right

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time, and never enough listening or the right listening to articulate the story that cannot be fully captured in thought, memory, and speech” (63). However, using more words will not necessarily produce a more accurate account: on the contrary, the rationalized version of the truth might actually be untrue—and not because it has been recounted in bad faith, but because it has tried to relieve the traumatized witness of the burden of an unbearable memory: whenever the rational supersedes the affect, it usually does so to the detriment of the account’s verisimilitude. José Arcadio Segundo seeks refuge from trauma in Melquíades’ manuscripts, which will ultimately turn out to be his family’s history written over one hundred years before it happened: “Free from all fear, José Arcadio Segundo dedicated himself then to peruse the manuscripts of Melquíades many times, and with so much more pleasure when he could not understand them” (255). Lack of understanding does not carry any negative connotation here, such as ignorance or stupidity, but rather implies freedom from fear. The absence of purely rational thought becomes substituted and compensated for by a total immersion into language, by a deliberate surrender to the pleasure of telling (writing) and, implicitly, of working through trauma—ultimately, the only kind of healing that the trauma victim can ever hope for. Understanding, on the other hand, does imply a dose of negativity: embracing absolute truth for the sake of historical or political correctness can only lead to the permanent torture of the trauma survivor. Suggesting the transgenerational character of trauma, the narrator shows Aureliano, the last of the Buendías, pick up a telephone that has been ringing for years, since the days of the massacre and long after the banana company left Macondo: “…an anguished and distant woman spoke in English, and he said yes, that the strike was over, that three thousand people had been thrown into the sea, that the banana company had left, and that Macondo finally had peace after many years” (311). The past will keep ringing until someone is willing to listen to it; and no matter how intense the pain of remembrance, coming to terms with one’s history might just prove to be worth every effort.

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* Postcolonial writers have often risked life and limb in order to give a voice to their nations’ silenced histories. A British citizen, Salman Rushdie has lived, since February 14, 1989, a Damoclesian life, with the threat to pay the ultimate price for being “unfaithful” to his religious roots. As García Márquez did in his novel, Rushdie uses in Midnight’s Children (1980) the voice of the colonized and the language of the colonizer in order to give life to a chronotope that he has not experienced directly; unlike the Colombian novelist, however, Rushdie writes from the colonial Center with the persuasive force and ironic pathos usually projected by a hybrid identity. And yet, how can a hybrid consciousness recognize and portray the colonial presence that has insinuated itself into one’s original identity and seems to undermine one’s future? Any hidden loss or absence (caused by historical or structural trauma, respectively) can be traced and reconstituted by the traumatic imagination and turned into narrative memory by authors and their readers. Only by writing trauma can one hope to learn how to cope with it and survive it: when killing the ghosts of one’s past fails, magical realism paradoxically revives them and simulates alternative ways of living with them. The voice recounting a traumatic event is never the same as the one that has been silenced by it. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, the artistic image of a language (of a linguistic consciousness) is always an intentional linguistic hybrid, meaning that “it is obligatory for two linguistic consciousnesses to be present, the one being represented and the other doing the representing, with each belonging to a different system of language” (The Dialogic Imagination 359). Born of Indian Muslim parents but raised and educated in England, Rushdie combines in his texts the language (in the Bakhtinian sense) of Western culture with that of his Indian ancestors without attempting, however, to incorporate the voice of the colonized within the tradition of the Center. Instead, his novels should be read “rather as literature that inaugurates a new language, a different reality, and an alternative way of envisioning the world” (Sanga 78). This new language, which I believe underlies magical realist

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writing, creates an apocryphal history from a postmodern, aporetic point of view. The official version of history, self-servingly promoted by the former colonizer, is thus replaced with an apparently realistic narrative that treats the natural and the supernatural equally, as parts of the same reality. The magical realist image “serves as a subversive rejection of the overwhelmingly scientific, rational approach to life of a culture that, in an ostensibly postcolonial world, still colonizes and still paternalizes, but economically and culturally more than militarily” (Harrison 55). As Rushdie himself has pointed out, one needs “a special style to speak or write about India,” even if only because its large population believes in God, so “the divine is a part of everyday life.” This aspect alone forecloses a realistic representation, “a rational, Western way of using language,” because it would amount to judging its people unfairly, from a stranger’s perspective. “Therefore you must use language in a manner which permits God to exist—the divine to be as real as the divan I am sitting on” (Rushdie, quoted by Harrison 12). I believe that Rushdie’s and other magical realist writers’ language, by extension to a postmodern world, rejects a reality oversaturated with preprocessed information and omnipresent visual media in which the human questioning spirit has been all but abolished. (Significantly, cinematic language is parodied in several instances in Midnight’s Children). Its originality of expression notwithstanding, Rushdie’s non-Western attitude toward reality is not unique: he shares it, among others, with García Márquez, whom he acknowledges as an important source of inspiration. If Western critics tend to treat Rushdie’s and García Márquez’s stories as fantasies divorced from political reality, Indians and South Americans are much less inclined to do so. Rushdie believes that to an Indian audience, “the fantasy elements in [Midnight’s Children] are relatively minor, and are only enabling devices to talk about actuality,” and that in South America One Hundred Years of Solitude is also not thought of as fantasy. In the same conversation he added, “I think that’s quite true about ‘magic realism’—what is important about it is that it is realism. Whereas in the West, that is to say America and Europe, both [García Márquez’s] book and my book have been treated as fantasy” (Rushdie,

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in interview with Pattanayak 18). However, the general attitude toward reality, including that of the Western world, might be about to change. Therefore, it can hardly come as a surprise that postmodern fiction should show a continuing shift toward modes of representation other than traditional mimesis—and not only in Latin America. When life itself gradually becomes stranger than truth, the growing unreality of the hyperreal requires a new kind of fiction, whose magical, incredible images might, paradoxically, recapture the gauged, sorted, labeled, and ultimately “lost” real. “In the global village we are increasingly aware of inhabiting and for many writers besides those from Latin America, the stranger-than-fiction quality of so much truth requires a truth to more than realism on the part of fiction” (Harrison 56). Consequently, Rushdie’s post-independence India, with its large diversity of cultures, has proved to be at least as fertile a ground for magic realism as Latin America. If one adds to the various indigenous languages and religions the influences that multiple invasions from the north and northwest, as well as two centuries of British rule have produced, the emerging picture is “as rich a potpourri of cultures as that of Latin America” (Harrison 56). Based on a similar colonial past, a shared propensity for exaggeration, and a hot climate, the Latin American nexus is alluded to in Midnight’s Children through the character of Mr. Emil Zagallo, a Peruvian geography teacher, under whose “mad eye” and “the steelier gaze of a framed Spanish conquistador,” Saleem learns what grows best in the heat, besides cane-sugar, coconut palm, and different fruit: “the tropical summer grows stranger fruit as well: the exotic flowers of the imagination blossom…” (191). His reflections on the by-products of heat take place in an equally hot political climate, during the 1956 demonstrations of the “language marchers,” who demanded the division of Bombay along linguistic boundaries: “Heat, gnawing at the mind’s divisions between fantasy and reality, made anything seem possible; the halfwaking chaos of afternoon siestas fogged men’s brains, and the air was filled with the stickiness of aroused desires” (191). Finally, Saleem’s short answer to Mr. Zagallo’s geography question is, “What grows best

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in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust” (191). The fragment is metafictional: the text’s comment on itself is that fantasy does not come gratuitously but is anchored in physical reality (heat), in emotional states (desires, lust), and in human absurdity (unreasonable political views). If the relationship between an actual chronotope (or source chronotope) and an artistic chronotope is that of symbolic mediation, then in Rushdie’s text it is one of symbolic deviation: signs (words) and their symbolic values do not so much mediate between reality and imagination as rearrange both ontological planes contiguously on the shared playing field of the literary text. Rushdie and his narrator, Saleem, cannot accept the notion of an independent India being born on a certain day in August 1947, as if whatever preceded that day had only been a huge void, an absence, a cultural black hole. The sarcasm that pervades Saleem’s reflections on the event of August 15, 1947 (when he is to be born, in fact, together with “independent” India), is meant to ridicule the arbitrariness of the “historical truth” created by the colonizer: …a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will—except in a dream we all agreed to dream; […] India, the new myth—a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivaled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God. (124–125)

The collective fiction called India is not simply the raw “stuff” that Rushdie’s artistic chronotope is made of: it is so real that it makes any symbolic mediation superfluous. What Rushdie’s text does accomplish, however, is a reshuffling of that fictional entity exactly in order to unmask its artificiality, its construct status. The “we” in “a dream we all agreed to dream” stands for the collective postcolonial subject duped into participating in yet another scheme contrived by the former colonizer.

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What the colonizer deceitfully projects as an absence (there was no India to speak of before the arrival of the British) is in fact a historical loss, a violent erasure of identity—ultimately, a source of historical trauma. To counteract the colonizer’s “official” deceit, the postcolonial author uses a ruse of his own: he creates a childlike, boastful, egocentric, and often unreliable narrator endowed with extra-sensory perception, whose sole raison d’être is to tell his story as if it were, both literally and literarily, the “newborn” country’s own. Through Saleem’s voice, the postcolonial author reappropriates a language (again, in the Bakhtinian sense of the term) that has been stifled for centuries and replaced with the colonizer’s own. The stutter in the narrator’s voice right from the lead paragraph of the novel indicates the uncertainty of someone who is just about to recover his voice and identity: I was born in the city of Bombay…once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. […] On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clockhands joined palms in respectful greetings as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. […] thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. (3)

As in any act of telling—but particularly in one involving a historical loss followed by trauma—the narrator is acutely aware of the presence of a virtual audience. The “once upon a time” formula is thus discarded from the start, first, because it sets up a fairy-tale atmosphere, and second, because it is about to create a mythical time frame exempt from history, which Saleem’s audience may find hard to buy into. The lack of agency of the post-colonial subject, suggested through his “handcuffing” to history, projects ab initio Saleem’s image as a victim of history— which, eventually, he will desperately try to dissipate throughout the narrative by linking more or less trivial occurrences in his personal or

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his family’s life to different milestones in the first thirty years of India’s and Pakistan’s independence.76 Rushdie invests Saleem’s voice with authority by assigning him the role of both porte-parole and catalyst of various actual historical events (realemes), such as government decisions, assassinations, demonstrations, wars, and so forth. By constructing a narrative from a personal perspective, Saleem tries to assert his identity, and at the same time to assume responsibility for—and give meaning to—his life. “Saleem appropriates history, shaping it to fit his version of the world. This self-narration is empowering, particularly for a person who could easily be viewed as the victim of history” (Reder 225–226). Only by rewriting (pickling) his country’s history can the postcolonial storyteller come to terms with his past, and envision a future in which he may have a say. Like many Caribbean novelists who had to reinvent the fluid histories of their own countries, Rushdie also writes postcolonial India into existence by undermining the English colonizer’s hegemonic discourse. As Emmanuel Levinas pointed out, the assimilation of the Other through knowledge inevitably results in violence because “ ‘the idea of truth as a grasp on things must necessarily have a non-metaphorical sense somewhere’ ” (quoted by Warnes 151). The postcolonial writer’s response to this epistemic violence is magical realism, which, in its postcolonial forms, opposes Western “othering” by naturalizing the supernatural and implicitly expanding the categories of the real” (Warnes 151–152). Indeed, Rushdie makes Saleem, his sometimes comically anxious narrator, write away feverishly lest he should miss any significant detail that might weaken the plausibility of his own version of history. One of Saleem’s greatest fears is that of forgetting his past. Rushdie himself has stated, more than once, that he wrote Midnight’s Children because ‘I wanted to restore that past to myself.’ Saleem’s narration of his own story represents a similar historical project, a quest for a cohesive identity, the coming together of past and present. To exist in the present, Saleem must make sense of his past. (Reder 228)

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Conscious of his contemporary audience, Saleem also keeps the next generation in mind, including his son; in this context, remembering and giving meaning to the past come to imply building and preserving one’s character—the closest chance of surviving one’s biological finitude: “My son will understand. As much as for any living being, I’m telling my story for him, so that afterwards, when I’ve lost my struggle against the cracks [reference to his cracking ‘like an old jug’], he will know. Morality, judgment, character…it all starts with memory…and I am keeping carbons” (241). If Rushdie’s protagonist uses carbon copies, García Márquez’s narrator Melquíades writes on parchments; if Saleem tells his story to establish a connection between past and present, and thus a continuance, Melquíades has already written the saga of the Buendías one hundred years ahead of time; if Saleem “pickles” the past in order to preserve its meaning and flavors for the future, Melquíades’s past catches up with the last Buendía in present narrative time, and the parchments are irremediably destroyed, showing that time is not cyclic, and does not have any second chances in store. However, the common ground where Rushdie’s Saleem and García Márquez’s Macondoans meet is their attention to the power of the word: words will save their past and their ties to the real world when the very survival of their memories is threatened. The role of memory is twofold: it both connects postcolonial subjects to their history and empowers them to build a (more) meaningful future. “For Saleem to lose his memory is to lose his identity; his link with the past which places him in the social and historical context that outlines his individuality. Memory is the chain which connects the postcolonial subject to his or her disrupted history” (Cundy 35). Moreover, in Saleem’s case, memory and the act of writing also help preserve his physical integrity. Rushdie’s metaphorical understanding of reality and of himself as a “migrant” identity may also confirm Saleem’s twofold ontological status. In a conversation with Günter Grass, Rushdie explained his specific way of looking at the world by pointing out the identical meaning of the Greek word “metaphor” with that of the Latin “translation”:

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This short semantic acrobatics sheds light, I believe, on the stylistic choice of the traumatic imagination (Rushdie-the-“translator”) that writes Midnight’s Children by giving voice to a postcolonial metonymy called Saleem. Both “migrant” consciousnesses have been “translated,” carried across into an imaginary place that they have to call “home,” “country,” “nation,” or “India.” Before starting his novel, Rushdie comes to India as an Englishman, while his narrator, Saleem, will be born in an India created/written by the English; the reality they discover on their own will not match the one that they have expected or have been supposed to see—hence their constant resort to imagination. The fantastic itself, as a continual leaving of the everyday, can also be read as a form of “migration.”77 In the typical vein of magical realism, entering the “condition of metaphor” turns almost literal when Mr. Zagallo, the Peruvian geography teacher, picks on Saleem to illustrate his notion of “human geography.” With a tug on Saleem’s oversized nose, “crazy” Zagallo addresses the class: “In the face of thees ugly ape you don’t see the whole map of India?” “See here—the Deccan peninsula hanging down!” “These stains are Pakistan! Thees birthmark on the right ear is the East Wing; and thees horrible stained left cheek, the West! Remember, stupid boys: Pakistan ees a stain on the face of India!” (264–265). Then, as a blob of goo emerges from one of Saleem’s nostrils, a student cries out, “Lookit that, sir! The drip from his nose, sir! Is that supposed to be Ceylon?” (265). If there is a certain amount of black humor in the scene, it will quickly dissipate when the angry teacher grabs Saleem by the hair and shakes him

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so violently that the unfortunate child falls to the ground with a bloody bald spot on the top of his head. The physical injury and the humiliation inflicted on Saleem’s body and psyche serve as metonymies of the colonial encounter—with an additional twist of irony, however: the perpetrator of the violent act is not a representative of the English colonizer but of the Spanish conquistador. Identities shift or get blurred constantly in Saleem’s narrative; in fact, for all he knows (and he never knows anything for sure), the narrator himself could be Shiva, the other newborn with whom he was mistakenly switched after birth, in Dr. Narlikar’s hospital. But identities are shown undergoing transformations even before Saleem’s birth. About two months before India’s independence, Saleem’s future parents move to an upscale neighborhood, where houses are about to be evacuated by their former owner, an Englishman called William Methwold. In that short period of relatively peaceful cohabitation with the former colonizer, Saleem’s parents and their Indian neighbors undergo some strange behavioral changes: they come to speak and act intermittently in both Indian and British ways. Moreover, when there are only twenty days left, even Methwold—who has used up his waning authority by asking the Indians to observe a daily six-o’clock cocktail hour and by forbidding them to sell or change any of the furniture in his houses—starts using Indian words against his will, by sheer force of habit. But now there are twenty days to go, things are settling down, the sharp edges of things are getting blurred, so they have all failed to notice what is happening: the Estate, Methwold’s Estate, is changing them. Every evening at six they are out in their gardens, celebrating the cocktail hour, and when William Methwold comes to call they slip effortlessly into their imitation Oxford drawls; and they are learning, about ceiling-fans and gas cookers and the correct diet for budgerigars, and Methwold, supervising their transformation, is mumbling under his breath. Listen carefully: what’s he saying? Yes, that’s it. ‘Sabkuch ticktock hai,’ mumbles William Methwold. ‘All is well.’ (109)

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The novel’s implicit questioning of Western colonial discourse “allows us to see that hybridity occurs not solely as a one way process, where colonizer forces his practices on the native, but also through the influences of the native on the colonizer which gives way to new formations” (Sanga 76–77). The Methwold Estate turns into an entropic system in which identities clash, transform, or mimic each other in a continual state of tension: the scenes and the character descriptions linked to it are perhaps the most suggestive of postcolonial hybridity in the entire novel. Hybridity is often confused with a hodgepodge of traits and characteristics constituting a new identity: while it is true that the resulting identity cannot entirely be traced back to any of its individual components, it should not be viewed as a finite composition either, but as a dynamic system tending to solve its contradictions and to reach uniformity—hence entropy. In the postcolonial hybrid, “[w]hat emerges is a reconciliation of native and foreign forms even as those forms continue to exist independently” (Sanga 77). In his seminal work The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha has defined hybridity by founding it on the concepts of “splitting” and “doubling”: hybridity represents an area of tension rather than of conflict resolution between different cultures (107). When the new Indian residents of the Methwold estate have their daily six-o’clock cocktail and speak with an Oxford drawl, for instance, they do not act out a ritual appropriated from the colonizer but simply the parody of one; in this context, mimicry is less imitation (mimesis) than it is mockery. “The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority” (Bhabha 88). Subversion comes from within: when the colonizer looks at the colonial subject he has created in his own image, he does not see a mirror reflection of himself but a parody. The humorous language and the witty innuendoes that characterize most of Rushdie’s novels do not take away any of the seriousness of their themes and the verisimilitude of their plots. By the author’s own recognition, the marvelousness of his writing has something to do with the environment in which he began to think, that is, “one in which it was accepted that stories should be untrue, […] the idea that fiction

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should be a lie, that it should be a wonderful story. And the belief was that by telling stories in that way, in that marvelous way, you could actually tell a kind of truth which you couldn’t tell in other ways” (Rushdie, in conversation with Grass 75). However, fantasy is not a gratuitous game that the author chooses to play, but “a method of producing intensified images of reality—images which have their roots in observable, verifiable fact” (Haffenden 43), a fact also found in García Márquez’s admission that there is no line in his novels that should not be based on reality. Rushdie’s view is that intensifying certain elements of reality does not equate with abandoning realism altogether: “[German playwright Bertolt] Brecht said of course realism is not an aesthetic, realism—to paraphrase him—is whatever you have to do in order to describe what you see. If that involves golden angels coming from underneath mountains, then that’s realism. Realism is whatever it takes. To be metaphorical does not mean that you cease to be realistic” (Brooks 62). Magical realism is more than a writing mode: more importantly, it constitutes an attitude toward and a way of approaching reality—a reality that is almost never perceived in the same way by different subjects, in different places, at different times. Perception may change with one’s vantage point, the distance in time and space to the object perceived, and one’s clarity of vision (whether one wishes or refuses to see the truth). Trying to remember and to re-create the past as accurately as possible, Saleem also ponders the issue of perceiving reality; the protagonist’s thoughts on illusion and reality lend the text a metafictional character: Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems—but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible. Suppose yourself in a large cinema, sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up, row by row, until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually the stars’ faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; the illusion dissolves—or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality. (189)

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The closer one looks, the more likely reality (or rather its illusion) is to dissipate from under one’s eyes. The tiny details of the screen projection, viewed up close, do not carry any message in themselves, whereas the illusion of the actors’ faces, perceived from a distance, is likely to tell some kind of story. Also, the further one gets from the past, the more one resorts to imagination in order to remember it, and thus the more credible the past will seem. Moreover, if the past belonged to a shock chronotope, temporal distance and imagination would make it not only more credible but, first and foremost, more accessible. The incongruity that I see in Saleem’s analogy is that he relates the effects of reducing spatial distance with those of diminishing a temporal one; however, maybe the congruity is supposed to occur in the beholder’s mind. In any case, the guru’s levitation scene in Midnight’s Children seems to contradict Saleem’s theory of reality and perspective. As readers enter with Saleem the room of a clairvoyant supposed to foretell Saleem’s future, they follow Saleem and his mother Amina Sinai’s point of view: “there is no furniture…and Shri Ramram Seth [a guru] is sitting cross-legged, six inches above the ground. I must admit it: to her shame, my mother [Amina Sinai] screamed…” (92–93). Had the levitation act been left at that, one could have ascribed it to the same category of magical realist imagery as Father Nicanor’s levitation in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Eventually, however, to Amina Sinai’s disappointment, “Ramram the seer was not really floating in mid-air, six inches above the ground. My mother’s scream faded; her eyes focused; and she noticed the little shelf, protruding from the wall” (94). Thus, contrary to Saleem’s belief that a close-up perception makes reality grotesque, in this particular scene remote reality looks terrifying, whereas a closer look at it makes it more reassuring and acceptable. If it involved a traumatic event, however, this scenario would raise serious adjustment and coping issues: the closer the event (temporally), the lesser the witness/survivor’s ability to recount it, let alone to come to terms with it and make it acceptable for reason. Because it is a question of perspective, “in Rushdie’s world, reality is subjective; it must be narrated, given form” (Reder 241). As Saleem

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himself acknowledges, “Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form” (259). Handcuffed to history as he finds himself from birth, Saleem cannot simply recount it, for one thing because it would mean repeating the myth created by the colonizer’s discourse; therefore, he must start with a clean slate and create his own history by interpreting the forms that he discerns in the one happening around him—and to him. Reflecting on his own narrative, he acknowledges that although “[r]eality can have metaphorical content; that does not make it less real. […] Midnight’s children can be made to represent many things, according to your point of view” (230). In his metafictional comment addressing the reader, Saleem confuses metaphor with symbolism: midnight’s children may, indeed, represent different things depending on one’s point of view, but that would make them symbols rather than metaphors—in other words, they are not implied comparisons but associations of meanings; and the most important association that Saleem establishes is to the modern history of India: Understand what I’m saying: during the first hour of August 15th, 1947—between midnight and one a.m.—no less than one thousand and one children were born within the frontiers of the infant sovereign state of India. In itself, that is not an unusual fact (although the resonances of the number are strangely literary)—at the time, births in our part of the world exceeded deaths by approximately six hundred and eighty-seven an hour. (224)

“Understand what I’m saying”: the narrator’s frantic appeal to his readers’ attention speaks exactly for his anxiety and concern about establishing meaning in his narrative. Although he seems to downplay the importance of the births themselves, he is careful to underscore the meaning (and the implicit associations) to be found in their number. Within ten years, however, 420 children die, and the number alluding to Scheherazade’s tales will be reduced to 581, “coincidentally” the number of members in India’s parliament. Capable of communicating telepathically with all the children born on the midnight of India’s independence, Saleem names the group the Midnight’s Children Conference

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(MCC), using the initials of the Metro Cub Club. Gradually, as events in the history of independent India become more violent and end in disaster, Saleem’s enthusiasm over the exceptional powers of the group wanes accordingly. The children’s optimism gives way to bitterness and frustration, and they start using their powers randomly and wantonly. “As the nation’s history grows darker, the individual lives of the children begin to parallel the darkness, and instead of infinitude, turn toward annihilation. History, here, is the agent of a malevolent force that seeks to disprove the innocence of childhood” (Sanga 27). From a stylistic point of view, at least, the MCC’s magical powers provide probably the most exciting scenes in the novel. Although most of the magical events and exaggerations in the novel “help acclimatize the reader to an ambient air of fantasy” (Harrison 58), magical realism resides mostly in the children’s powers and activities. When Saleem makes it clear that “not all the children’s gifts were desirable, or even desired by the children themselves,” he seems to imply that destiny or fate (for lack of a higher power) may have played a certain role in linking (“handcuffing”) these exceptional creatures to India’s history. Among the children Saleem cares to introduce to his readers are: the Delhi beggar-girl called Sundari, “whose beauty was so intense that within moments of her birth it succeeded in blinding her mother and the neighboring women who had been assisting at her delivery” (226); Kerala, “a boy who had the ability of stepping into mirrors and re-emerging through any reflective surface in the land”; “a Goanese girl with the gift of multiplying fish.” To these Saleem adds “children with powers of transformation: a werewolf from the Nilgiri Hills”; “a boy who could increase or reduce his size at will”; “a blue-eyed child of whose original sex [Saleem] was never certain, since by immersing herself in water he (or she) could alter it as she (or he) pleased”; “a sharptongued girl whose words already had the power of inflicting physical wounds”; “a boy who could eat metal and a girl whose fingers were so green that she could grow prize aubergines in the Thar desert” (227). In the last two cases, one may recognize the magical realist (and generally postmodernist) strategy of the literalization of metaphor: having a sharp

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tongue usually does not empower one to inflict physical wounds with it, nor does possessing green fingers enable one to grow eggplants in a desert. Furthermore, the MCC also includes “a witch-girl with the power of healing by the laying-on of hands”; a girl from Madras “who could fly higher than any bird simply by closing her eyes” (228); and the most important MCC member in Saleem’s story, Parvati-the-witch, who “had been given the powers of the true adept, the illuminatus, the genuine gifts of conjuration and sorcery, the art which required no artifice” (229). Finally, leaving all modesty aside, Saleem believes that he was given “the greatest talent of all—the ability to look into the hearts and minds of men” (229). Evidently, there is a lot of wishful thinking involved in these fantastic characters and their magical activities: the political, social, and religious violence and chaos that plagued post-independence India (some of whose reverberations can still be felt today) could indeed use the help of a few miracles. In my view, the stories of the midnight’s children and their supernatural powers are projections of the traumatic imagination, fictional strategies of filling a historical void—ultimately, their author’s way of representing (and working through) historical and possibly transgenerational trauma. Besides the latent trauma caused by two centuries of colonial oppression and a continual erasure of cultural identity, Rushdie’s novel also focuses on a scene of extreme physical violence, quite similar in fact to the massacre of the striking banana workers in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The mass killing here takes place on April 13, 1919, twenty-eight years before Saleem’s birth (and India’s independence), when Brigadier R. E. Dyer, the Martial Law Commander of Amritsar, appears on one of the busiest streets followed by fifty troops. Saleem recounts the event by using his grandfather’s (i.e., a primary witness’s) point of view: As Brigadier Dyer issues a command, the sneeze hits my grandfather [Aadam Aziz] full in the face. ‘Yaaaakh-thoooo!’ he sneezes and falls forward, losing his balance, following his nose and thereby saving his life. […] There is a noise like teeth chattering in winter and someone falls on him. Red stuff stains his shirt. There are screams now and sobs and the strange chattering continues.

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THE TRAUMATIC IMAGINATION More and more people seem to have stumbled and fallen on top of my grandfather. He becomes afraid for his back. […] The chattering stops and is replaced by the noises of people and birds. There seems to be no traffic noise whatsoever. (34)

The humor of the sneezing episode fades quickly away as the text suggests that the soldiers are mowing down the crowd. After the sneeze, the scene switches from visual details to auditory ones (except for the “red stuff”), which makes sense considering that Aadam Aziz has fallen on his nose, thus temporarily unable to see anything. In fact, none of the details describes any kind of violence; only the repetition of “chattering” may remotely suggest the unfolding horror (in connection with the screams and the sobs), while the use of “red stuff” instead of “blood” accounts for the initial traumatic shock when any conceptualization is still impossible. Implying the onset of psychic numbing, the scene ends on a casual note, using short, simple sentences, and numbers—exact numbers: Brigadier Dyer’s fifty men put down their machine-guns and go away. They have fired a total of one thousand six hundred and fifty rounds into the unarmed crowd. Of these, one thousand five hundred and sixteen have found their mark, killing or wounding some person. ‘Good shooting,’ Dyer tells his men, ‘We have done a jolly good thing.’ (34)

Official history tells us that the “jolly good thing” ended with Brigadier General R. E. Dyer’s troops killing “close to four hundred and wounding well over a thousand, [ensuring] Gandhi’s ultimate triumph, though it took the British governing class another ten years to begin to realize this fact” (Harrison 15). However, as in García Márquez, the author’s main concern is not the number of casualties but the sheer horror of the event. Amid the general political and religious violence that engulfed India, the number of Dyer’s victims paled in comparison with the total number of dead. During the riots that accompanied the time of independence and the partition of the country, “between two and three hundred thousand were killed—Muslims by Hindus, Hindus by Muslims, and at least as

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many again by hunger and disease amid the chaos” (Harrison 16). Issues of language and religion continued to cause violent clashes between different social groups and communities well after the country’s becoming independent. In Saleem’s narrative, one such political assassination involves Mian Abdullah, known as the Hummingbird, and founder of the Free Islam Convocation. His nickname was due to his energetic behavior and constant humming, which supposedly gave men in the same room with him tremendous erections. The scene of his killing lacks any direct (“realistic”) references to the assassins or their movements: There was a knock on the door and Nadir answered it. Six new moons came into the room, six crescent knives held by men dressed all in black, with covered faces. […] The Hummingbird’s hum became higher. Higher and higher, yara, and the assassin’s eyes became wide as their members made tents under their robes. Then—Allah, then!—the knives began to sing and Abdullah sang louder, humming high-high like he’d never hummed before. (48)

Again, as in the Amritsar scene, the focus is not on the bodies of the perpetrators but on their weapons (the “six new moons”). As the scene progresses, the auditory detail of the humming becomes obsessive by repetition: But now—listen!—Abdullah’s humming rose out of the range of our human ears, and was heard by the dogs of the town. [Six thousand four hundred and twenty of the curs] went noisily, like an army, and afterwards their trail was littered with bones and dung and bits of hair…and all the time Abdullahji was humming, humming-humming, and the knives were singing. (48)

The humming of the victim and the singing of the knives reach a level of intensity suggestive of the dull pain and compulsive return (insistence) of a traumatic experience. Exacerbating the scale of the killing and raising it to that of atrocity, Saleem ends it with more than six thousand dogs, which, summoned by the humming, dash into the building and tear the assassins to pieces. As in real life, a small local incident can sometimes easily snowball into a national disaster or historical catastrophe.

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Saleem learns early on that death may be contagious, and can intensify one’s perception of reality. When, because of his youth, he is not allowed to see Doctor Narlikar’s corpse, a gardener, Purushottam the sadhu, explains to him, “It is dangerous to look too long at death; otherwise you come away with a little of it inside you, and there are effects. […] A death makes the living see themselves too clearly; after they have been in its presence, they become exaggerated” (202–203). However, just as he finds out that “there is no escape from form,” Saleem also realizes that there is no escape from death either: his entire narrative is a testimony to that effect. His frequent self-questioning, hesitations, and interior monologues are rendered in a language visibly affected by trauma: No!—But I must. I don’t want to tell it!—But I swore to tell it all.—No, I renounce, not that, surely some things are better left…?—That won’t wash; what can’t be cured, must be endured! […] —But I mustn’t presume to judge; must simply continue (having once begun) until the end; sense-and-nonsense is no longer (perhaps never was) for me to evaluate.—But the horror of it, I can’t won’t mustn’t won’t can’t no!—Stop this; begin.—No!—Yes. About the dream, then? I might be able to tell it as a dream. Yes, perhaps a nightmare… (485)

What could Saleem be possibly considering to tell as a dream? That which can not be cured; that which must be endured: the horror of it. Although he might sound like Joseph Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz here, Saleem has too much love and compassion in him to be overcome by the darkness. Therefore, he courageously dedicates himself to the task of writing trauma, of bearing witness to its causes, while stoically bearing the pain involved in the process. Through his narrative, Saleem tries to come to terms with historical trauma—with the trauma of postcolonial India. What he realizes in the process is, first, that “[w]hat’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same” (87); and second, that “memory has its own special kind [of truth]; […] in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than this own” (242). Rushdie’s attention

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to the forms of representation demonstrates the significant connection between the magical realist mode of writing (as a constant questioning of the real and of its own modus operandi) and the reality-representation theories of Baudrillard, Ellul, Debord, and Žižek. In Fiction after the Fatwa: Salman Rushdie and the Charm of Catastrophe, Madelena Gonzalez also notices that “[Rushdie’s] obsession with the problem of representation reveals the instability of truth, so that the use of the fantastic becomes problematic or even, one might say, a problematization of the real in a magic realist mode and finally a parody of that mode” (Gonzalez 202). And what better parody of a representation than the concept of pickling or “chutnification” of history that Saleem amply describes toward the end of the novel? Symbolic value of the pickling process: all the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-sized pickle-jar; six hundred million spermatozoa could be lifted on a single spoon. Every pickle-jar (you will forgive me if I become florid for a moment) contains, therefore, the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time! I, however, have pickled chapters. […] In words and pickles, I have immortalized my memories, although distortions are inevitable in both methods. We must live, I’m afraid, with the shadows of imperfection. (529)

Besides the immortalization of memories and thus the preservation of time, another merit of pickling would be the celebration of diversity: a combination of tastes and flavors can survive time if the spices and the vinegar are right. “One day, perhaps, the world may taste the pickles of history,” ponders Saleem. “They may be too strong for some palates, their smell may be overpowering, tears may rise to eyes; I hope nevertheless that it will be possible to say of them that they possess the authentic taste of truth…that they are, despite everything, acts of love” (531). Memories, truth, and diversity can only be saved from the often destructive forces of history by the power of human endurance, tolerance, and empathy: thus, although inspired by India’s troubled history,

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Saleem and the midnight’s children’s experiences also reveal, without necessarily answering, universal questions about history, society, and human behavior on both individual and macro-social levels. * Rushdie and García Márquez write India and Colombia into existence, but unlike their Caribbean fellow-writers discussed in previous chapters, Rushdie and García Márquez try to heal historical wounds by re-writing history itself through fictional simulacra. Whether their myths are called India or Macondo, both authors take on colonial (and postcolonial) traumata by either writing history anew on a clean slate (García Márquez) or writing over a pre-existing palimpsest of texts (Rushdie). If neither One Hundred Years of Solitude nor Midnight’s Children ends on an optimistic note, there is also no suggestion of stoicism toward a putatively fallen humanity on the authors’ part; on the contrary, both novels establish themselves as acts of agency, as belated (traumatic) responses to historical wrongdoings, and as implied calls for change. As postcolonial trauma novels, they “critique Western complacency in dealing with nonWestern testimony, and call for the development of alternative modes of address” (Buelens and Craps 5). I am certainly not alone when positing that shock chronotopes, or traumatic histories, usually need exceptional modes of writing.78 As a postmodernist literary mode, magical realism pushes the boundaries of mimesis beyond the photographic mark of traditional nineteenth-century realism. Although not limited to postcolonial trauma novels, “it is in its postcolonial incarnations that magical realism fulfills its creative and critical potential to the fullest” (Warnes 28–29). Magical realist writing succeeds in giving voice to the voiceless and speaking the unspeakable without appropriating the victims’ (hi)stories and by keeping a respectful distance from their pain. The metafictionality of the mode, as proven by Rushdie and García Márquez, prevents it from turning into a dogma of representation by constantly questioning and parodying its own narrative strategies. ***

CHAPTER 6

“HOW CAN WE EAT AND DRINK WHEN SO MANY HAVE PERISHED?” SURVIVING THE HOLOCAUST

Surviving the Holocaust involved much more than physical survival— even if surviving the concentration camps undeniably constituted in itself a victory in the resistance against the Nazis’ “Final Solution.” Generally referred to as the “systematic killing of approximately six million Jews by the Nazis in death camps and in other settings from late 1939 well into 1945” (Harvey 210), the Holocaust has not only challenged established beliefs in the moral progress and superiority of European civilization, but also crushed whatever confidence Western society at large might still have had in its “intrinsic” goodness and sense of justice. As Primo Levi and other survivors have pointed out about three to four decades after the end of World War II, remembering the Nazi genocide and paying its victims the homage they deserve will always be essential if humankind wants to prevent atrocities of similar nature and scale from ever happening again. However, basic questions about what one can or

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should remember, how, and through whose voice have given way to still ongoing discussions about the appropriateness of different modes representation (survivor testimonies, memoirs, fictional narratives, fantasies, or visual works of art) and even whether one should talk about the Holocaust at all or just keep silent to honor the victims who cannot any longer speak for themselves. The act itself of “talking about” the Holocaust represents an expression of agency, the victory of memory over forgetting—of the human spirit over the uncontrolled (and uncontrollable) forces to which it sometimes succumbs. Trauma theorists have pinpointed the significant difference between witnessing and bearing witness by emphasizing the active nature of the latter. According to Jeffrey Blustein, for example, the “relationship between bearing witness and witnessing is unidirectional: that is, those who bear witness are witnesses, but not every witness bears witness, […] because bearing witness is an exercise of agency and a kind of undertaking, whereas one can be a witness simply in the sense of being a passive observer or an observer who is not allowed to turn away” (307). While there are evidently traceable causes that tend to confer a “passive observer” status on certain witnesses, the act of bearing witness, “itself a kind of memorial act” (302), stands out as an attempt to bring order into survivors’ traumatic memories, on the one hand, and to shape their identities, on the other. In the context of the Holocaust, however, the sheer physical survival of the concentrationary universe (which meant the ultimate collapse and annihilation of all traces of humanity) constituted in itself an act of defiance against, and ultimately triumph over, the Nazis’ attempt to erase the Jewish race and culture, including their memory, from history. The authority to speak on behalf of the victims who have not lived to tell their stories and on behalf of the first-hand witnesses (or survivors) who have not been able to for one reason or another—such an authority can pass on to proxy witnesses, who can be either individuals or an entire community (religious or ethnic) to which the victims belonged. Speaking for the victims, proxies may thus come to exercise the victims’ “right to tell the truth about [their] life and experience, a right which is of fundamental importance for moral agency” (344–345).

“How Can We Eat and Drink When so Many Have Perished?” 219 Besides the ethical issues involved in representing the atrocities suffered by the Jewish people at the hand of the Nazi executioners, Holocaust studies have also brought into focus the devastating effects of long-term trauma and possible ways of coping with historical loss. By the cruelty of irony, it even seems that the most infamous tools of the Nazi genocide, the gas chambers, “were developed after Nazi commanders and Adolf Eichmann, the head of the SS division responsible for final solution activities, discovered that even elite SS soldiers carrying out the summary executions were showing what we would refer to as PTSD-like symptoms associated with their work” (Harvey 210–211). Perpetrators’ trauma, although a reality of most violent events, is altogether different from the trauma suffered by the innocent victims of their actions. The resurgence of interest in Holocaust studies, particularly in the past decade, has prompted scholars such as Daniel Schwarz to raise the question of whether to assign its causes to a new return of the repressed and a globalization of the Jewish community: “What is it about our time that has brought the Shoah to the fore? Is it in part what we might call the CNNing of the world so that now the Jewish global village can look into its past together, while forming an elaborate support group?” (8). One of several possible and quite disturbing explanations would involve a rekindled human fascination with extreme, unexplainable evil; another one could also be the recent realization that the last survivors and witnesses are approaching the end of their lives (Schwarz 10), and soon there will not be any authentic voices left to speak about the Holocaust. Some scholars have been bothered by the sheer concept of fictive reconstruction of the Holocaust, which they believe might be disrespectful to its victims; others have questioned the legitimacy of nonJewish writers to talk about the genocide; other voices have raised objections against fantasy literature and hyperbole as inappropriate media of representing the event; and a minority is determinedly against any representation of the Holocaust (Schwarz 3). The German scholar Theodor Adorno wrote that “after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric,” because it means to “squeeze aesthetic pleasure out of artistic representation of the naked bodily pain of those who have been knocked

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down by rifle butts…” (quoted by Howe 179). While acknowledging the validity of Adorno’s objections, scholars like Lawrence Langer have since deemed his opinions too dogmatic (Langer 2). Certain novels by Jewish-American writers, for example, prove that fantasy literature, and particularly its magical realist mode, far from being disrespectful (or “barbaric”) toward the victims of the Holocaust, comes to re-create its reality in retrospective, from the second half of the twentieth century. As Cheuse and Delbanco put it, “The truth is of this world, not beyond, and it is a moral truth. Fantastic, symbolic, mythic, timeless, universal, poetic, or anything else the fantasy may be, the truth it tells is true” (Cheuse and Delbanco 61). Moral truth is what Bernard Malamud’s and Joseph Skibell’s fantasyimbued novels are meant to be about. Malamud was not a Holocaust survivor, and neither is his fellow countryman Skibell. Although the two Jewish-American authors did not witness the Holocaust or possess any personal memories of it, they have re-created its horrors in their novels prompted by, and relying on, what I have called a traumatic imagination. Although a contemporary of the Holocaust (he was forty-one at the end of World War II), Malamud acquired knowledge of the genocide and the pogroms that had preceded it in European history through his readings. A third-generation descendant of Holocaust survivors and related to some of its victims, Skibell dedicates his novel to his great-grandparents and their children, so in addition to his readings, he can also claim a family history of trauma. The reason for mentioning these authors’ relationships to a shock chronotope from which they were geographically (and the younger one chronologically) distanced is that most critics of postHolocaust writing (histories, memories, and especially fiction) tend to question the authority of a proxy witness’s voice by his ethnicity, religion, and/or the nature of his connection to the event. Moreover, it becomes even harder to speak of any authority or the right itself to bear witness to the Holocaust, when one considers Primo Levi’s doubts about whether the survivors themselves should in fact be entitled to the status of true witnesses, considering that the dead, the “complete witnesses” (those who “have touched bottom”) could not be heard anymore.79 However,

“How Can We Eat and Drink When so Many Have Perished?” 221 I believe that, without appropriating the victims’ voices, Malamud and Skibell bear witness by proxy, and give shape to the victims’ memories through fictional representations of the Holocaust. As others have also remarked, “bearing witness is not synonymous with directly observing, and one can bear witness to events at which one was not present” (Blustein 307). Not only critics’ but also readers’ expectations may determine whether a piece of Holocaust fiction should be taken seriously or not; overall, there persists a “simple mistrust of invention in relation to the Holocaust” (Vice 4).80 However, extra-textual (ethnic and biographical) considerations are gradually becoming moot after more than sixty years since the end of World War II. As the survivors’ generation is fading away, witness testimonies have been steadily giving way to more imaginative literary representations of the Holocaust chronotope—certainly less authoritative than survivor testimonies (memoirist literature) but still claiming an authenticity of their own. Even if imaginative fiction can never equal the survivors’ moral entitlement to representing the genocide, it must still assume its own ethical responsibility of re-creating the horrific nature of the event—as opposed to any specific or directly witnessed occurrences—in order to prevent its gradual disappearance in the mist of time. In fact, all future Holocaust writing will necessarily have to meet new criteria of acceptability because “any new literary perspectives on the Holocaust after the middle of the third millennium can only be written by descendants of survivors or by novelists with no connection to the event” (Vice 4). As long as contemporary and future fiction writers can keep a respectful distance from the victims’, survivors’, and witnesses’ voices, without any direct or disguised attempt at appropriating and using them as their own, they will be in their turn entitled to claims of authenticity for their creations. Never to be confounded with testimonial narratives, their novels will in a way bear witness to witnessing; post-Holocaust imaginative fiction can preserve the memory of atrocity by constantly adding new layers of writing onto the palimpsest of history, and thus expanding and deepening the perspective of the initial accounts of the shock chronotope by conveying not so much the

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facts as the tremendous amount of human suffering, pain, and horror that characterized it—as opposed to covering, replacing, or imitating the original layer of writing. The transparency of the original will need to be kept visible at all time: horror, after all, cannot—should not—ever be interpreted. Keeping alive the memory of the unspeakable (by making it imaginable) can have only one goal: a constant and acute awareness of the ominous possibility of its recurrence. * Malamud’s main concern was not so much his Jewishness as the general perpetuation of evil and injustice in the world and primarily in the American society of his time. Born in a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia, in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, in the year when World War I was about to sink Europe in blood and chaos, Malamud grew up in poverty and had to cope with his mother’s early death (Hershinow 3). He was a secular Jew who, by his own admission, read about Judaism only in his adult years, and his casual attitude toward Jewish theology would often draw harsh criticism of his works from different Jewish publications (Hershinow 7–8). However, what is important to Malamud is the Jewish ethnic identity as a symbol of universal persecution and injustice. The Fixer (1966), his novel most closely connected to the Holocaust (yet without representing it by any direct reference), is set in Czarist Russia, in 1911 Kiev. Through its plot—inspired by the historic Mendel Beilis blood libel trial, a Russian version of the infamous Dreyfus case in France—Malamud creates a proleptic nexus between early-twentiethcentury anti-Semitism and the crimes of the Nazis to follow only four decades later. The arbitrary arrest, the two-and-a-half-year detention in subhuman conditions, and the fake accusations to which the protagonist of Malamud’s novel is subjected presage, in nascent forms, three basic components of the Holocaust: the non-Jewish (and mostly Christian) ordinary citizens’ complicity, both active and passive, in the face of atrocity; the farcical character of the official ideology of racial hygiene; and the deliberately organized physical demolition of the Jews. According to Lillian Kremer, “Czarist incarceration and pogrom in The Fixer

“How Can We Eat and Drink When so Many Have Perished?” 223 may be read as a foreshadowing of and an objective correlative for Nazi concentration camps and crematoria” (95). Even if, ultimately, the Final Solution was the Nazis’ brainchild, some of its causes at least, such as religious fanaticism, social discrimination, and economic misery, had been fomenting hatred against Jewish populations for centuries, and even led to extreme physical violence during the pogroms. Speaking about the inception of the novel, Malamud revealed that he had been looking for “a story [that] had happened in the past and perhaps would happen again. [He] wanted the historical tie-up so [he] could invent it into myth” (quoted in Field 38). He remembered the name of Mendel Beilis, whose story he had heard from his father when he was a boy: …I remember being moved and frightened by the story. Beilis, an office manager in a Kiev brick factory in tsarist times, was a Jew accused of committing a ritual murder; he was charged with killing a Christian boy and stealing his blood for the making of Passover matzos. This superstition, in an early form directed against the first Christians, was turned against the Jews and persisted in Europe throughout the Middle Ages. In modern times it was rife among many of the masses of prerevolutionary Russia; and even nowadays, from time to time, the accusation is revived in the Soviet Union. (Field 38)

However, it was not the historical theme of Jewish persecution that Malamud had been after but a very particular aspect of a man’s life: “Since I was interested in how some men grow as men in prison I turned to the Beilis case. […] The Fixer is largely an invention. […] However, in it I was able to relate feelingfully to the situation of the Jews in Czarist Russia partly because of what I knew about the fate of the Jews in Hitler’s Germany” (quoted in Field 38). Malamud’s words are important for at least two reasons: first, they reveal the fact that a historical event, particularly an extremely violent one such as the Holocaust, tends to acquire meaning—most likely for the first time—when viewed in retrospective. One may then infer that the plot of The Fixer is actually not what Kremer called a foreshadowing but a backshadowing of the Holocaust, because it was written more than two decades after World War II

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by someone who already “knew about the fate of the Jews in Hitler’s Germany.” (However, Kremer is not altogether wrong: as far as narrative time goes, the novel is a foreshadowing of events to come.) Obviously, if Malamud had not been writing from the future, so to speak, he (and his reader) could not create a transhistorical nexus and put the Nazi genocide in a more or less meaningful perspective. And second, Malamud’s words are also important because they unveil empathy and, to a certain extent, signs of vicarious traumatization: being “able to relate feelingfully to the situation of the Jews in Czarist Russia” means being able to leave one’s safe condition behind and immerse oneself (if only temporarily) in a situation whose pain and horror one will never actually know. Paradoxically, The Fixer was born not from its author’s interest in Jewish history but from his more immediate concern with injustice in his native country (initially, Malamud wanted to write a novel based on the Sacco-Vanzetti case): “So a novel that began as an idea concerned with injustice in America today [1966] has become one set in Russia fifty years ago, dealing with anti-Semitism there. Injustice is injustice” (Cheuse and Delbanco 88–89). No matter how commendable such a universally humanistic utterance may be, equating by a sleight of hand the horrors of the Holocaust with other instances of historical injustice (however violent and painful in themselves) might still raise serious concerns and protests from many Holocaust survivors and scholars. It is rationally difficult, and at the same time morally inappropriate, to accept generalizing abstractions (“Injustice is injustice”) in the face of so much physical annihilation: the Nazi horror exceeded the limits of the normal category of injustice—or the limits of any normality, for that matter. If I am critical of Malamud’s homogenization of the idea of historical injustice, I do not, however, imply any lack of sensitivity on his part in regard to the Holocaust. On the contrary, I think that Malamud is in fact “guilty” of too much sensitivity, which becomes apparent in his obsessive search for meaning (how could it happen?) by putting the Holocaust in perspective among other histories of violence, or similar events that had preceded it and might have paved the way for it. Moreover, in his

“How Can We Eat and Drink When so Many Have Perished?” 225 seemingly compulsive return to the unexplainable shock chronotope that he had never directly experienced, I see the symptomatic effect of vicarious traumatization. As Kremer also remarks, “That Malamud chose an indirect rather than direct method of coping with the most traumatic event of recent Jewish history offers powerful testimony to the American writer’s difficulty in coming to terms with the literary transmission of the Holocaust…” (Kremer 101–102). To speak of (or to re-create) a loss that one has not personally experienced may be viewed either as a sign of inexcusable hubris or one of commendable empathy. Although usually the result of an overcharge of affect, the traumatic imagination cannot create a more or less coherent narrative memory out of nothing; it always needs the “raw material” of a traumatic memory of one kind or another (physical violence, extreme pain, prolonged states of fear and anxiety, etc.). As said, Malamud had never had any traumatic experiences close to that of the Holocaust or to the persecutions that he wrote about in his novels. However, under the emotional impact that readings about genocide and pogroms must have had on him, he transformed a historical event foreshadowing the Holocaust into fictional reality. The jump back in time occurred through reading Russian texts and emulating their setting: The old Russia I created was an educated guess and the writer’s invention, I suppose, and then there were some details that I found in Russian literature—in ‘The Steppe’ of Chekhov, for example. We writers, you know, live and grow on the literature of the past. When I finally got to Kiev I was curious to see if it was like what I had imagined. I was pleased to see that my version would pass. (quoted by Meras 17)

What makes instances of intertextuality so fascinating is the variety of connections that they usually rely on: geographic, temporal, cultural, or in one word—chronotopic. Moreover, it is not only the connotations of one chronotope pointing to another that convey complexity to Malamud’s novel but also the text’s languages (in the Bakhtinian sense of the word). The Jewish-American author disguises his own language by

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that of characters from a different chronotope (Czarist Russia), whose language he further disguises by that of the perpetrators of a more recent chronotope (the Holocaust)—and thus places them in an unmistakably dialogic relation. The third-person limited omniscient narrator of The Fixer follows the hardships and injustices undergone by Yakov Shepsovitch Bok, a poor, self-educated Jew living in a shtetl in early twentieth-century Ukraine (Russia). Shortly after he arrives in Kiev looking for work (he is a handyman or fixer), Yakov is arrested and accused of stabbing to death a Russian boy and of using the youth’s blood for Passover matzos. The plot is quite slow-paced because the storyteller’s interest lies less in the events experienced by the protagonist than it does in the changes that they bring about in his character. From a comparative perspective, I believe that many readers recognize in Yakov’s character and predicament at least one element from Franz Kafka’s Joseph K. (The Trial [1925])—such as the anguish of being accused of something outside one’s knowledge or control—and one of the basic traits of Henri Charrière’s Papillon (even if The Fixer precedes Papillon [1969] by three years): the will to resist prison authorities by staying alive and never giving up his identity. However, The Fixer is not an incarceration narrative because, ultimately, Yakov plays along with the rules of the system exactly in order to prove his (and his ethnic group’s) innocence; he never tries to escape as a Papillon or Monte Cristo would. Yakov undergoes two-and-a-half years of humiliations and physical abuses while waiting for a trial that never starts. Survival as a form of resistance is a common theme in most post-Holocaust narratives: “[Yakov’s] resistance to Russian brutality is reduced to the most elemental form, as it was [or, rather, will be later on] in the Nazi camps: staying alive. Survival is resistance, for by staying alive Bok will force the government to bring him to trial. In the process he is transformed from self-denying to committed Jew” (Kremer 99–100). Yakov’s spiritual journey from individualism to compassion, commitment, and eventually self-sacrifice for a cause greater than himself (the prevention of yet another pogrom) constitutes the narrative core of the novel; it is a journey that weaves together all the underlying

“How Can We Eat and Drink When so Many Have Perished?” 227 themes and symbols in the text: Christian hypocrisy and intolerance; religious fanaticism; farcical ideology and politics; and the inexhaustible human potential for cruelty. Yakov’s relationship with Russian history bears some resemblance to Saleem’s connection to Indian history in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: sooner or later in both narratives, the main characters come to identify themselves with the plight of their peoples. However, there is a slight difference of agency in their status and attitude toward history. From the beginning of Midnight’s Children, Saleem, who conflates in his narrative his own story with India’s post-independence history, proactively engages in political events and believes in his exceptional powers to impact and orchestrate them according to his and the midnight’s children’s will; toward the end of the novel, however, he ends up as just another victim of post-colonialism rather than as one of its agents. On the other hand, Yakov starts out as a noncommittal, conflict-avoidant, self-centered individual who only minds his own family and trade. Only after his arrest will he gradually transform into a more empathetic human being and eventually into the savior of Russia’s Jewish population. Consequently, while Saleem finally finds himself crushed by history, Yakov—even if physically defeated—is elevated by it. As much as he wants to escape history, early on in the narrative Yakov feels that he is being drawn into it: “When he wasn’t reading, Yakov was composing little essays on a variety of subjects—‘I am in history,’ he wrote, ‘yet not in it. In a way of speaking I’m far out, it passes me by. Is this good, or is something lacking in my character?’ ” (58). Having the Holocaust in mind, Malamud developed his literary character as a metonymy for the victims of the most horrific genocide in history. Even the character’s name suggests his symbolic function in the story: That Yakov Bok is a scapegoat and precursor of the six million Jews who will lose their lives in the Holocaust is suggested in his emblematic name: Yakov (Israel) Shepsovitch (son of sheep) Bok (goat). Bok understands the lesson that Jews will learn in the Nazi era: ‘Being born a Jew meant being vulnerable to history, including its worst errors.’ (Kremer 97)

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If Rushdie’s Saleem is “handcuffed to history,” Yakov Bok feels “fatigued by history” (58), overwhelmed by its whirlwinds, which will seemingly not stop till they have drowned him and his entire race. Before feeling the extreme violence of Jewish persecution on his own skin, Yakov experiences history through his readings—which might also be interpreted as a mirroring of the author’s relationship with history: “he devoured two newspapers every day, though they often gave him the shivers, both things reported as fact, and things hinted at; for instance, Rasputin and the Empress, new plots of terrorists, threats of pogroms, and the possibility of a Balkan war” (57). Yakov’s interest and immersion in the day’s news propagating juicy gossip and fear might actually echo Malamud’s own language—a conscience traveling back in time through the voice of a literary character. Consequently, Malamud’s character undergoes a twofold trauma: first, a mediated one, through being exposed to and vicariously experiencing traumatic events; and second, a direct one, through becoming a victim of historical persecution and violence himself. Although lacking any formal education, Yakov seems perceptive enough to make transhistorical analogies when reading Russian history: Yakov also read a short biography of Peter the Great, and after that a horrifying account of the bloody destruction of Novgorod by Ivan the Terrible. […] He marched in with his army, and after putting his subjects through the cruelest tortures, daily slaughtered thousands of them. This went on in increasing savagery, the sound of horror rising to the sky as the wailing mothers watched their children being roasted alive and thrown to wild dogs. At the end of five weeks, sixty thousand people, maimed, torn, broken apart, lay dead in the foul-smelling streets as disease spread. Yakov was sickened. […] The Russians make pogroms against the Russians—it went on throughout their history. (58)

Yakov makes proof not only of native intelligence but also of a vivid imagination and a keen sensitivity toward the suffering, pain, and horror that a historical military action must have involved. He displays the ability to see beyond facts and relate to the human drama hiding behind

“How Can We Eat and Drink When so Many Have Perished?” 229 them. And yet, what Yakov still has difficulty understanding is his own role in the unfolding of history; he seems intrigued by the amount of unwarranted attention from Russian society: [A] whole society has set itself against Yakov Bok, a poor man with a few grains of education, but in any case innocent of the crime they accuse him of. What a strange and extraordinary thing for someone like himself, a fixer by trade, who had never in his life done a thing to them but live for a few months in a forbidden district, to have as his sworn and bitter enemies the Russian State, through its officials and Tsar, for no better reason than that he was born a Jew, therefore their appointed enemy, though the truth of it is he is in his heart no one’s enemy but his own. (246)

Unlike Rushdie’s Saleem, Yakov has no ambitions whatsoever of becoming an agent of history: ironically, however, it is history that chooses him whether he likes it or not, and makes a catalyst out of him (not exactly an agent but an ideological object of sorts). The narrator describes Yakov’s initial reticence and eventual acceptance of his “kidnapping” by history with a rare touch of humor: Once you leave [the shtetl] you’re out in the open; it rains and snows. It snows history, which means what happens to somebody starts in a web of events outside the personal. It starts of course before he gets there, We’re all in history, that’s sure, but some are more than others, Jews more than some. If it snows not everybody is out in it getting wet. He had been doused. He had to his painful surprise, stepped into history more deeply than others—it had worked out so. (281)

It is important to note that the narrator adopts the free indirect style by intermingling his own voice with the character’s diction, and his own thoughts with those of the character. The passage underscores the fact that ideas acquired through reading might actually make one “step into history,” in other words, they are likely to connect the individual—at least on an imaginative level—closer to his community and country.

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Overcoming his individualism and assuming a more meaningful role in society might also be seen as Yakov’s ways of working through trauma. Before he is confronted by historical injustice and abuse, Yakov must cope with both familial (transgenerational) and personal trauma. Again, the demons of his past are brought back to life by association with his present fears: He was frightened of the pogrom threatened in the newspaper. His own father had been killed in an incident not more than a year after Yakov’s birth—something less than a pogrom, and less than useless: two drunken soldiers shot the first three Jews in their path, his father had been the second. But the son had lived through a pogrom when he was a schoolboy, a three-day Cossack raid. On the third morning when the houses were still smouldering and he was led, with a half dozen other children, out of a cellar where they had been hiding he saw a black-bearded Jew with a white sausage stuffed into his mouth, lying in the road on a pile of bloody feathers, a peasant’s pig devouring his arm. (8)

With such a baggage of traumatizing images (the former imagined and the latter experienced directly), Yakov starts out in life keeping to himself and shutting out the background noise of history (pogroms, terrorist attacks, executions, etc.). The graphic images are meant not only to add details to Yakov’s character but also to make readers empathize with him through the narrative function of the traumatic imagination. The author wants us to see what Yakov sees and feel something very close to what he feels throughout the narrative, starting with the aforementioned sequence and continuing with the two-and-a-half years of prison abuse. The prison episode, which takes up about two thirds of the entire novel, is particularly graphic and effective in its emotional impact on the reader: it includes scenes of beatings, long periods of starvation, solitary confinement, food poisoning, abusive body searches, and physical violence. For example, the details in the scene describing the prison surgeon operating on Yakov’s feet become almost literally painful to the reader by their sheer power of suggestiveness: “This was the first bed he had been in since his arrest. He slept for a day and a half. When he awoke,

“How Can We Eat and Drink When so Many Have Perished?” 231 the surgeon, smoking a cigar, unwound the bandages and operated on his feet. He cut into the pussing sores with a scalpel, without anaesthetic. The prisoner, biting his lips to be silent, cried out at each cut” (169). The foreshadowing (from the perspective of narrative time, or backshadowing from the authorial standpoint) of the atrocities carried out by the Nazis in ghettos and extermination camps is quite evident: “Malamud’s delineation of the prison sequence is informed by the physical conditions of the Nazi camps, and Bok suffers as the Jews did under the Nazis, not for a crime committed, but for being born Jewish” (Kremer 98). The extensive use of sensory details—mostly visual, auditory, and olfactory but often also tactile—creates a text in the vein of the best realistic tradition. And yet, Malamud does not confine his writer’s craft to realistic tableaus of human suffering. In spite of his use of mostly realistic scenes, Malamud refuses to assign to the reality perceived exclusively through the senses the status of absolute truth; consequently, he infuses his text with numerous fantasy elements—but in such a subtle way that even sequences clearly suggestive of dreams blur the borderlines between reality and imagination. I cannot accept Sheldon Hershinow’s explanation that Malamud introduces fantasy to deal with “the difficult artistic problem of preventing the story from becoming static” (Hershinow 70). The occasional insertion of fantasy does not speed up the pace of the plot in any way but rather makes its reality matter more in the readers’ minds. Malamud was very much aware of the importance of “illusion” in one’s perceptions of the world (somewhat in Baudrillard’s sense of the word): illusion not only completes one’s knowledge of the universe but also governs the entirety of one’s relationships with reality. In one of his articles, Malamud wrote, Human beings are mysterious, complex, difficult to know. […] Human beings can’t see everything. We don’t know everything. We explain many things wrong. There is much that eludes us, much that’s mysterious about this life and this universe. And, therefore, what we are often doing when we are living our lives is guessing what reality is. The more I experience life, the more I become aware of illusion as primary experience. (87)

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“Guessing what reality is” could also describe what Yakov does many times while in prison. However, one cannot speak of fantasy if a dream sequence interrupts the character’s moments of waking. On the other hand, whenever the ontological status of the fantasy scene becomes questionable—without any clear delimitations, the dream world and reality are superimposed—one may easily discern the magical realist writing mode as in the following passage from the prison episode: One night [Yakov] awoke hearing someone singing in the cell and when he listened with his whole being the song was in a boy’s high sweet voice. Yakov got up to see where the singing was coming from. The child’s pale, shrunken, bony face corroded copper and black, shone from a pit in the corner of the cell. He was dead yet sang how he had been murdered by a black-bearded Jew. […] Yakov listened to the end of the song and cried, ‘Again! Sing it again!’ Again he heard the same sweet song the dead child was singing in his grave. (223)

Although innocent of the boy’s murder, Yakov is evidently traumatized by the sheer thought of the youngster’s being sacrificed by a rabbi, an image implanted in Yakov’s brain mainly by Grubeshov, the prosecuting attorney. The scene could be read as a dream if only it did not start with “Yakov got up to see”—which suggests a waking mode and implicitly a transgression of the boundaries of reality. In a contiguous sequence a little later, the boy revisits Yakov not as a ghost but as a physical presence: “Before daylight Zhenia came to him with his punctured face and bleeding chest and begged for the return of his life. Yakov laid both hands on the boy and tried to raise him from the dead but it wouldn’t work” (286). The religious connotation notwithstanding, the scene conflates the reality of the quick with that of the dead as if such encounters were common occurrences. The longest fantasy scenes in the novel are Yakov’s conversations with the czar Nicholas the Second. While in the first scene “Nicholas II appeared in the white uniform of an admiral of the Russian Navy” (225), in the subsequent one, “Nicholas the Second, of medium height, with frank blue eyes and neatly trimmed beard a little too large for his face, sat

“How Can We Eat and Drink When so Many Have Perished?” 233 there naked, holding in his hand a small silver ikon of the Virgin Mary” (296). The minute visual details are meant, of course, to mislead readers and make them accept the “historical” meeting as real, at least for as long as the literary experience lasts. However, because the scene starts in medias res, with no introduction and no plausible ending, the narrator’s deceit succeeds only partially—and intentionally so. Yakov’s confrontation with the czar, the highest authority responsible for the persecution of the Russian Jews, amounts to little more than a wish-fulfillment in the Freudian sense of dream interpretation. As much as Yakov would like to learn the answer to the question Why?—which has haunted Holocaust survivors and historians for over half a century now—Nicholas the Second proves unable to abandon his rhetoric of hatred toward Jews, as if he were himself under some unexplainable spell of universal evil. When Yakov finally shoots the czar, for instance, readers already know that Yakov is actually being taken to trial, so a stop-over at the palace must have been quite unlikely: “Pointing the gun at the Tsar’s heart […], Yakov pressed the trigger. Nicholas, in the act of crossing himself, overturned his chair, and fell, to his surprise, to the floor, the stain spreading on his breast” (299). Readers feel compelled to experience the scene as real even if in the next sentence they are already in the carriage taking Yakov to his trial. * If Malamud raised a few eyebrows because of his secular approach to Jewish identity and his generalizing treatment of historical injustice, probably no other post-Holocaust writer has pushed the limits of imaginative fiction so far as Joseph Skibell has in his novel A Blessing on the Moon (1997). Not only his temporal remoteness from the Holocaust but also his allegedly irreverent style of representing its victims has prompted criticism of his work. According to Michelle Ephraim, Although Skibell uses his great-grandfather’s name [Chaim Skibelski] for his narrator in the novel, academics such as Alvin Rosenfeld and representatives of the Holocaust Museum have criticized the book for violating ‘the unspoken rules of Holocaust

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THE TRAUMATIC IMAGINATION fiction by representing Jewish victims not as heroic martyrs, but as a group laden with human imperfections… Skibell’s novel fails, Rosenfeld [has] claimed, because the author neglects a social responsibility to represent victims with the utmost reverence.’ (quoted in Kersell 20)

With an attitude toward Jewish identity quite similar to Malamud’s, Skibell insists on the universal human traits—which necessarily include universal human flaws—of the victims of the Holocaust rather than on their uniqueness and intrinsic innocence. Nancy Kersell believes that the character of “Chaim Skibelski reinforces rather than diminishes the horrors of the Final Solution. He enlists our sympathy because we can identify with his imperfections as an ordinary human being. He also represents the eleven million victims without idealizing their difference from the rest of us” (20). However, even if Chaim does behave like an ordinary human being and not like a ghost/zombie throughout the narrative, readers learn that he is anything but ordinary starting with the lead paragraph of the novel, in which Chaim is executed and thrown into a mass grave. The very first scene in the novel is indicative of extreme trauma: no experience, however traumatic, can possibly equal that of violent death. Chaim Skibelski’s narrative voice is even more understated than that of Malamud’s narrator. The scene of the execution is rendered less through realistic details or factual numbers (how many soldiers, how many victims, how far from the town, when, etc.) and more through individual sensations. Similar to the scenes of massacre in Rushdie and García Márquez, Skibell’s also lacks specific words denoting physical violence: They rounded us up, took us out to the forests. We stood there, shivering, like trees in uneven rows, and one by one we fell. No one was brave enough to turn and look. Guns kept cracking in the air. Something pushed into my head. It was hard, like a rock. I fell. But I was secretly giddy. I thought they had missed me. When they put me in the ground, I didn’t understand. I was still strong and healthy. But it was useless to protest. No one seemed

“How Can We Eat and Drink When so Many Have Perished?” 235 to hear the sounds I made or see my thrashings, and anyway, I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, because then they would have shot me. I was lying in a pit with all my neighbors, true, but I was ecstatic. (3–4)

Chaim sees the execution not only as a violent act but also unexplainable and somewhat intriguing (“I didn’t understand”) in its arbitrariness and suddenness. When its result, death, finally dawns on Chaim, readers come to experience an ontological leap in the world of the narrative, and need to adjust to the fact that henceforth the dead will be alive and behave like any normal living person would; moreover, the dead can interact with the world of the living in a tangible, physical way. Drifting between a life that he has just left behind—or, better to say, which has been violently snatched away from him—Chaim acts out, symbolically, extreme trauma (although, in fact, all acting out of trauma has a more or less symbolic character). Several times he wonders whether his present world is the World to Come, or if not, whether he will ever reach it. The fantasy elements in Skibell’s novel are almost all (with rare exceptions but none gratuitous) symbolic expressions of trauma. When the same soldier who shot Chaim in the beginning of the novel sneaks up on him in the forest saying, “One step more, and I’ll kill you again” (98), his threat can be read as an indication of the repetition compulsion that characterizes the process of acting out trauma (in fact, by victims and perpetrators). In one form or another, the original event, too shocking to have been rationalized when it occurred, keeps returning with the same affective impact that it had initially. The insistence of traumatic memories is also suggested in the scene in which Chaim and his family (wife, children, in-laws, and grandchildren) sit around a dinner table at the sumptuous hotel Amfortas and have an incongruously light banter about the way each of them has died: Markus [one of Chaim’s grandchildren] describes how they drowned him, holding his head in a bucket of freezing water. ‘But why?’

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THE TRAUMATIC IMAGINATION ‘A medical experiment,’ he says, and he cannot stop laughing. ‘Doctors from Berlin to Frankfurt are probably drowning their patients at this very moment, all thanks to me!’ (155–156)

The youth’s off-hand account of the “medical” killing makes Chaim ponder the arbitrariness of the crime and the character of the perpetrators: “How is it possible for men to make laws against another man’s life, so that by merely living, he is guilty of a crime? And what kind of men enforce such laws, when they could be out on a clear day, boating or hiking or running to their mistresses instead?” (156). These are not questions specific to Skibell’s narrator or to the author himself but questions that have been asked by Holocaust survivors and scholars for more than five decades now; these are questions that still haunt humanity’s collective consciousness regardless of where someone lives or what his/her connections to the Holocaust might be. The hotel, which initially seems to be a paradisiacal safe haven for all those who have already died, turns out as yet another ruse of the perpetrators of genocide. As soon as tickets for a mandatory steam bath start being distributed among the guests, readers can already notice the red flag and become aware that this is not an ordinary hotel. Semantically, and particularly in the context of Holocaust fiction, a steam bath and a gas chamber can suggest similar situations. It only so happens that Chaim misses his turn at the steam bath and eventually realizes that all the guests, including his entire family, have disappeared. Losing his family for a second time brings too much grief for Chaim to bear: I close my eyes and see only the ovens and their flames, their blue tongues licking across the bodies of my Ester, my Sarah, my Edzia, my Miriam, my Hadassah, my Laibl; consuming my sons-in-law and their children, Markus, Solek, Israel, Pavel, Pola, Jakob, Sabina, Marek and his daughters; devouring my town as well. Everyone I know, everyone I have ever known, has disappeared into the ash. I have torn my clothes and fallen to my knees, but my grief is insufficient. Were the oceans made of tears and the winds of sighing, still there would not be tears enough nor sighs to assuage my crumpled heart. (199)

“How Can We Eat and Drink When so Many Have Perished?” 237 The Holocaust is a wound that never closes, and imaginative fiction is there to keep it alive for both present and future generations. However, the form of such fiction still raises questions about the appropriateness of representation and its content. Whose suffering exactly is being reenacted? How? By whom? And to what effect? After a genocidal event of the size of the Holocaust, life cannot remain the same. The trauma caused by a personal loss of unimaginable proportions drains Chaim of his life energy, as it actually does most survivors and witnesses of the genocide. Even enjoying a simple meal becomes impossible: “The steam from the soup rises to fill my nostrils. Despite its tasty aromas, I sink back into my chair, utterly morose, my appetite dwindling away like blown straw. How can we eat and drink when so many have perished? I don’t care if it is the Sabbath!” (215). These are Chaim’s thoughts while he is the guest of the two Hasidic Jews who, as legend has it, have sunk the moon with their greed by filling up their boat with too much silver. Chaim’s feelings of estrangement, caused by his unique experience of loss, the continuing sense of guilt for having survived, and the breakdown in communication with non-witnesses, are characteristic of most Holocaust survivors: I spend the Sabbath hating them [the two Hasids, Zalman and Kalman] bitterly. Simply for being alive when I and my family are not. Where do they find the gall to persist in their petty lives? Choosing a hat, locking a door, corking a bottle of wine. The care they take over each and every pointless detail. It sickens me. My food grows tasteless in my mouth. I cannot swallow it. I look across the table into their beaming faces and see, instead, my own children’s faces and the faces of my grandchildren, and even their children’s faces, faces now that will never be born. Many, many worlds have been lost, not simply my own. (218–219)

Chaim, of course, is only a “temporary” survivor, a literary character that reenacts for readers the painful recurrence of trauma; therefore, they need to trust him as such and to let his message sink in first affectively and only then rationally—if there is any reason at all behind the atrocities of the Holocaust. Skibell’s response to those questioning the viability

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of Holocaust fiction is that “ ‘the man-made prohibition against making graven images of this event we call the Holocaust seems to derive from a suspicion of storytelling, of art and literature’ ” (as quoted by Vice 7). However, through the form of his writing, Skibell cannot but keep that suspicion alive. For an audience familiar with mass-culture and desensitized by countless zombie films, Chaim’s post-execution physical apparition might not come across as too shocking or even unfamiliar. Chaim’s description of his shot-through face might in fact easily bring to mind a zombie: “One side is entirely missing, except for an eye, which has turned completely white. Barely hanging in its socket, it stares at itself in an astonished wonder. My grey beard is matted thick with blood, and broken bits of bone protrude here and there through the raw patches of my flesh. I look like a mangled dog carcass” (11). A similar image is conveyed later in the story, when the other executed Jews climb out of their mass grave as well: “Although the harsh winter seems to have slowed their decay, their milk-white bodies show evidence not only of rot, but also of mutilation. […] The soldiers’ lime has eaten into their skins, gnawing deep rouged gashes into their chins, into their cheeks” (81). Considering the relatively young age of the novel’s author, one may safely assume that Skibell’s linguistic consciousness and imagination have been informed by today’s ubiquitous pop-cultural images. In this context, A Blessing on the Moon is an instance of postmodern pastiche, in which the language of the literary image has entered into a dialogic relation with the cinematic language of the big screen. However, in the case of Skibell’s text, the meaning and the symbolic depth of the image convey the uniqueness of its referent and differ considerably from the cheap thrills offered by a zombie film. On the other hand, if zombies are usually visible for everyone, Chaim’s walking corpse is only visible to, and can interact with, the other dead (Jewish or non-Jewish, like the soldier) and the two Hasids in the last episode of the novel. The only exception among the living is Ola Serafinski, the thirteen-year-old daughter of the Polish family that has moved into Chaim’s house immediately after his execution. Ola can see Chaim’s dead body because she is the only one who can empathize with

“How Can We Eat and Drink When so Many Have Perished?” 239 him and feel pangs of guilt over his eviction and execution, while the rest of her family revels in its newly acquired home, furniture, clothes, and household objects. Skibell’s message is unequivocal: only feelings of guilt or/and empathy may be able to establish a viable communication between Holocaust survivors and the generations that have followed them. The memory of the victims can only survive through remembering and telling (and re-telling) their stories without ever appropriating their voices. Fantasy intrudes again into the already fantastic premise of the novel—Chaim’s ongoing life as a walking dead—when Ola dies of tuberculosis and ascends into heaven: “She lifts both her arms and closes her eyes and ascends through the sky towards the fiery chariot [carrying Mary and Jesus]. Her long skirt billows out and I blush to see her underthings” (59). If I see an intertextual element in this scene, as I believe most readers would, then it is certainly the ascension to heaven of Remedios the Beauty in García Márquez (here the billowing skirt and there the Brabant sheets blowing in the wind are unmistakable giveaway signs). On the other hand, Chaim’s death (his final recession into nothingness), although a fantasy image, has nothing spectacular in it: time is rolled back until a gradual disappearance of his personal history and the loss of all his memories (including those of his former daily activities and his family) until all that remains is just the sound of his name and the image of a caressing mother—and the moon: My history falls away, like sacks of grain from a careless farmer’s wagon. I begin to forget everything. […] Beneath this large woman’s caressing hands, I forget my children’s names. Even their faces leave me. I no longer recall how I earned my living or why I died. I’m floating, free from detail, although I find I can still, without difficulty, remember my name. Chaim Skibelski. ‘Chaimka, Chaimka,’ the woman sings, ’look at the moon. Can you see the moon?’ My small body is flooded with well-being. I gurgle in her lap. With her large fingers, she carefully turns my head and the light of the moon fills my eyes, until it is all I see. (267)

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What remains of Chaim, a small body and a name, are in fact the ultimate causes of his death. It was his physical existence (the body) and its cultural marker (the name) that prompted his annihilation: he was put to death for no other crime than that of being a Jew. Through Chaim, Skibell wants to show what it means to die and yet not die, to lose loved ones once and to lose them again, to feel the same excruciating pain over and over again: this must be the true meaning of historical trauma. * Just as Malamud took on the religious superstitions and ethnical biases of Russian Orthodox Christians, Skibell offers scathing images of Polish complicity in the persecution of the Jewish minority. The Serafinskis show no pangs of conscience while enjoying the home, furniture, and household items that belonged to Chaim Skibelski only hours before his execution. During World War II, the Poles’ and other European nations’ attitudes toward the Nazis’ genocidal practices directed against the Jewish population usually ranged between indifference (turning a blind eye toward unambiguously criminal activities), passive acquiescence (rewarded with economic privileges), and downright active complicity (evictions, physical abuses, and executions). According to an article by Shmuel Krakowski from the early 90s, Anti-Semitic attitudes evident in a number of [public] responses indicate that anti-Semitic thinking habits die hard in Poland, not only among the Polish people in general, but also among many intellectuals and historians. However, side by side with the biased, apologetic, distortive, and anti-Semitically flavored traditional approaches, new venues have recently been opened in Polish historiography. Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust have become a subject of thoroughgoing study and discussions, without regard for the embarrassing, even highly disturbing, revelations they might produce. (Krakowski 207)

What puts in a bind anyone inclined to passing definitive judgments on the perpetrators of the Holocaust is the incomprehensibility—or maybe just the terrifying inadmissibility—of the evil residing in human nature.

“How Can We Eat and Drink When so Many Have Perished?” 241 In this context, Primo Levi considered the use of the term “torturers” in reference to the SS guards at the concentration camps inappropriate (at least semantically if not affectively) because it brings to mind twisted individuals, ill-born, sadists, afflicted by an original flaw. Instead, they were made of the same cloth as we, they were average human beings, averagely intelligent, averagely wicked: save the exceptions, they were not monsters, they had our faces, but they had been reared badly. They were, for the greater part, diligent followers and functionaries, some fanatically convinced of the Nazi doctrine, many indifferent, or fearful of punishment, or desirous of a good career, or too obedient.” (Levi 202)

In Levi’s logic, I discern traits of Conradian thought, and in his descriptions images of an ivory trader called Mr. Kurtz. This terrifying thought might explain the difficulty of finding an answer to the perennial question in relation to the Holocaust: How could it happen? In his last book, only a few years before his death, Levi warned that “it can happen, and it can happen everywhere” (Levi 199). Among the signs that prompted Levi’s warning was the worrisome familiarity of phrases such as “useful” or “useless” violence; episodes of “government lawlessness”; “violence generated by intolerance, lust for power, economic difficulties, religious or political fanaticism, and racialist attritions” which came to characterize late-twentieth-century public discourse (Levi 200). Should anyone miss the analogies to the current state of world affairs almost three decades later, Levi’s warning would have been in vain. As the main building block of memory, imagination helps connect a society’s past to its future; therefore, if humanity cannot make much sense of its future yet, at least it should collectively acknowledge the horrors of its past. By virtue of the uniqueness of the recovered event, the artistic chronotope of the Holocaust remains a constant reminder of the thin line that separates humankind from the darkness of horror of which it is occasionally capable. Past and present controversies notwithstanding, any act of bearing witness, including the fictional recovery of an extreme event as opposed to traumatic re-covery, exceeds the boundaries of an implied moral authority

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based on ethnic, racial, or religious affiliations, and necessarily carries the weight of a moral obligation. Blustein seems to revise his own definition of proxy witnessing when he writes that “[…] for extremely serious moral wrongs like genocide and other horrific crimes, familial or communal ties are not necessary to ground this authority [to bear witness]. Everyone, it may be said, has a right (if not an obligation) to bear witness to this sort of evil, simply by virtue of our common humanity with its victims” (353). Because of its complex psychological makeup, which includes a natural propensity for inflicting pain, suffering, and death, humanity cannot afford to forget the atrocities that have marred its history. Bearing witness to wrongdoings necessarily involves acts of remembering the victims and showing them the respect that they deserve by listening to their stories. Moreover, even if a traumatized survivor’s account happens to be revealed as factually and historically inaccurate, its testimonial value and authority are in no way lost, and his/her story should not be discarded as unreliable. Trauma victims and first-hand witnesses will never convey facts but lived/ felt experiences—a thought that makes me question Blustein’s statement that “the patient-cum-witness does not have the authority [to bear witness] if the truth is ‘not available’ to him and ‘continues to escape him’ ” because of symptoms of traumatic re-covery. […] Lacking insight and self-understanding, the patient lacks the competence or authority that testifiers must possess” (316). One obviously cannot have the same expectations of factual accuracy from testimonies by survivors of extreme events as one would from texts by professional historians. Moreover, even fictional accounts of extreme events, while evidently originating in an author’s imagination, cannot be viewed as untrue if they speak for a moral truth that transcends chronological data and statistics. Thus, Malamud’s and Skibell’s narratives are not, in fact, historical reconstructions of an anti-Semitic Czarist Russia or a Nazi-occupied Poland, but artistic representations of an entire shock chronotope, the Holocaust, and their value cannot be denied unless one also tends to miss the intrinsic nature of literary expression—which is synecdochic and not “barbaric.” ***

CHAPTER 7

“CONFRONTING ENDING ITSELF, MANY REPEATED ENDINGS” SURVIVING WAR

While the undeniable truth of the horrors of the Holocaust was revealed only after the arrival of the first advance units of the Allied Forces in 1945, war had already been ravaging Europe for almost six years, with a loss in human life amounting to scores of millions. One of the most suggestive fictional representations of the historical trauma that marked the shock chronotope of World War II belongs to an author of GermanSlavic parentage, Günter Grass. The time period covered by his novel The Tin Drum (1959) stretches between October 1899 and September 1954, starting with the inception of the protagonist-narrator’s mother in a field of potatoes, and ending with his finishing the very book that has been coming to life in the reader’s hands. At about the same time that Grass was writing his novel, another war chronotope, Vietnam, came to mar human consciousness half a world away, almost as if validating Primo Levi’s warning about the possible recurrence of “useless

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violence,” caused by “intolerance [and] lust for power” (200). The American author who has captured the traumatic impact and complicated moral implications of the Vietnam War, Tim O’Brien bears, just like Grass, not only his own share of individual guilt but also the collective guilt of the nation mainly responsible for the massive scale of the war and its atrocities—which does not mean, however, that either witness-writer adopts a mainstream or an officially sanctioned point of view in his novel. Moreover, while re-creating the felt reality of a war chronotope, O’Brien’s Going after Cacciato (1978), just like Grass’s novel, does not focus its theme primarily on war violence—even if the scenes describing killings and deaths outnumber Grass’s—but rather on an “unusual” state of mind caused by trauma and on the moral dilemma induced by a devastating feeling of guilt. As first-hand witnesses (and arguably victims) of a shock chronotope, Grass and O’Brien attempt to both re-cover and work through their individual traumata, and at the same time—and maybe more importantly—to convey universally human messages, such as the need for truth, no matter how hurtful, the importance of justice, and the impossibility of innocence. * The scope of Günter Grass’s Tin Drum (1959), the artistic representation of a war chronotope, stretches well beyond the series of synecdochic events and symbolic images woven into its plot. The main character and alternately first- and third-person narrator, Oskar Matzerath, just like Grass, tries to remember that which constantly escapes remembering— the roots of mass-scale horror—in order to prove his innocence and rid himself of feelings of guilt or, at least, guilt by association or complacency. The work has been referred to as an “aesthetic reconstruction of the genesis of evil” (Keele 5), the product of a consciousness tormented by its own suspicions of guilt. Born in1927, Grass became a member of the Jungvolk, the “cubs” of the Nazi Party, when he was ten, and of the Hitlerjugend, the Hitler Youth, at fourteen (Keele 5). Like most young men of his age, he also had to “volunteer” as Luftwaffenhelfer (Air Force Auxiliary) at fifteen, and joined the Arbeitsdienst, (the Work

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Service) at sixteen (Preece 2). At the end of February 1945, after he had finished his military training, seventeen-year-old Grass left home as a tank gunner while the war was entering its last phase (cf. O’Neill 1, Keele 5, Preece 2). As an adult reminiscing about the war years, Grass came to realize that, in spite of his young age, which had prevented him from any serious participation in the Nazi atrocities, he had nevertheless been old enough to have played some role in their facilitation (Preece 1). By his own admission, “you can tell by my date of birth [October 16, 1927] that I was too young to have been a Nazi, but old enough to have been moulded by a system that, from 1933 to 1945, at first surprised, then horrified the world” (cited by Keele 1). The identity that the system has molded and the share of guilt that the young soldier was forced to assume have stayed with the Nobel Prize-winning author throughout his lifetime, and after thirteen years, have found their expression in Oskar Matzerath, his literary alter-ego. Convinced of his guilt and traumatized by the scope of the horror in which he played an active, if only partially conscious, part, Grass has only had limited choices in shaping the contradictory, grotesque, and at the same time complex personality of his main character; his writing constitutes yet another instance of an artist’s traumatic imagination at work.81 Grass’s first war-related traumatic memories may be traced back to the couple of months, between February and April 1945, he spent first on the front and then, after being slightly wounded in a battle near Cottbus, in a hospital in Marienbad. He recalls that, after his tank was blown up by a mine, he was transferred to an infantry unit and participated in combat against the advancing Red Army. Besides the constant exposure to lethal danger, witnessing a large number of violent deaths over a short period of time must have induced severe battlefield trauma: “My first experience of terror was when my company, with some other units, fell under fire from so-called Stalin-Organs [multiple-rocket launchers] in a wood. Within two hours, no, under two hours, a third of our company, boys of sixteen or seventeen like me, had been killed or seriously wounded” (cited by Preece 2). Wounded not far from Berlin on April 20 (Hitler’s last birthday), he was later captured by the American forces and

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interned in a prisoner-of-war camp in Bavaria, from which, as part of a reeducation program, he was taken on a tour of the concentration camp at Dachau, outside Munich (cf. Keele 5, O’Neill 1). The revelation at Dachau of his nation’s historical guilt—dimmed by skepticism until the even more revelatory Nuremberg Trials—came to add the heavy burden of individual guilt and the syndrome of perpetrator’s trauma to a consciousness already shattered by severe combat trauma. Confronting the terrifying historical reality and his own role in it meant a “mental turnabout which would begin to power his creative work more than a decade later” (Preece 4), and would change the identity of the seventeen-yearold Grass forever. His most accomplished literary work, The Tin Drum, is incontestably an attempt at working through, and at the same time, evidence of subconsciously acting out trauma, as well as yet another example of the creative energy of the traumatic imagination. War trauma and individual guilt were not the only factors to shape the future writer’s identity; besides a profound ideological dislocation, Grass also suffered a cultural dislocation after moving to the west and leaving the place of his birth, the Free City of Danzig, behind. Salman Rushdie, his friend and literary disciple, has sympathetically noticed Grass’s “loss of roots, the sense of home as a ‘good’ safe place” and the “loss of language,” meaning that “the German language had to be ‘rebuilt, pebble by pebble, from the wreckage: because a language in which evil finds so expressive a voice is a dangerous tongue’ ” (cited by Preece 4). In this respect, Grass’s experience is perhaps not that different from Paul Antschel’s (the German-speaking Jewish poet also known as Paul Celan) or that of most contemporary postcolonial Anglophone writers, and by that I mean not only the inadequacy of language as a form of communication and artistic expression, but also the multiple cultural codes that make up the kaleidoscope of angles that Mikhail Bakhtin called heteroglossia. Thus, the German, the Pole, the Kashubian, and the traumatized war veteran can be heard “talking” to, over, or past each other, and shape the utterly unreliable narrative voice and the grotesquely inadequate protagonist of The Tin Drum. In a European cultural context, Grass’s identity may also be regarded as the product of “linguistic multivocality” and

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cultural “hybridity” (terms used by Homi K. Bhabha in a postcolonial context). Historically, Grass’s hometown of Danzig was a mixture of German Protestants (mostly), Polish Catholics, and Jews, and “once the war was finished, his mixed background enabled him to look at his fellow Germans from the outside as well as from within: he both belonged and did not belong” (Preece 9–10). The feeling of not belonging must have been fueled also by the realization of the presence of evil right outside his hometown. The small village of Stutthof became the location of a concentration camp right on the second day of the war. Originally destined to house Polish inmates, the camp later added a crematorium and a gas chamber. The final number of its victims is now estimated between 65,000 and 85,000 (Preece 6–7). Another teenage trauma in Grass’s life and an important motivation for writing The Tin Drum was the loss of his mother, Helene Grass, when he was thirteen; he has never stopped mourning her. In his words, “I had always wanted to prove something to her; but it was not until her death that the impulse was set free” (cited by Preece 13). It is quite usual that a trauma narrative should combine different traumatic experiences from its author’s life (the early loss of a parent or the strained relationship with another), and reflect them conflated in one of his fictional characters’ traumatic responses—for example, to Nazi terror (in Grass’s case) and to war atrocities (in O’Brien’s). In The Tin Drum, Oskar’s mother, Agnes, dies from an allergic reaction to eels, while his father, Alfred, chokes on a Nazi party badge toward the end of the war. It also appears that the inspiration for the three-foot-high Oskar came from observing a three-year-old child beating a drum in a café (McCarthy 274–275).82 However, the fictional gnome who recounts his maternal lineage and his life until the age of thirty—with certain stages punctuated by major historical events—is anything but a reliable storyteller. The narrative voice constantly shifts back and forth between a firstperson “I” and a deceivingly detached, anonymous third person following the point of view of a central character named Oskar. In many instances, the two voices even share the same sentence; for example, the shattering of all the lobby windows of the Stadt Theater, one of Oskar’s

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supernatural feats, is apparently carried out by two subjects: “After a few minutes of variously pitched screams which accomplished nothing, I succeeded in producing an almost soundless tone, and a moment later Oskar noted with joy […] that two of the middle panes in the end window of the lobby had been obliged to relinquish their share of the sunset…” (Grass 104–105). The significance of the multi-voiced narrative and the literary-conscious narrators goes beyond that of a gratuitous postmodernist experiment in meta-literature. As other critics have also noted, The constant switching from ‘Oskar’ to ‘I’ by the narrator in the novel is indicative of Oskar’s inability to shed all masks and to accept himself as he really is: Oskar the hunchback with the past of a three-year-old drummer. […] His essence as an individual, like the variety of evil his drumming represents, is not characterized by any particular role he assumes but is the total sum of all these roles taken together. This is the ultimate truth that Oskar must face: he is not one but many. (McCarthy 299–300)

Grass’s unreliable, double-voiced narrator is in and by himself the embodiment of a traumatized self. As mentioned earlier, the novel constitutes a clear example of heteroglossia, being made up of at least three languages (the two narrators’ and the implied author’s) that belong to the same literary consciousness, Grass’s, and are “dialogically interrelated” (Bakhtin 324). In one of his rare moments of candidness, the narrator ponders that “[he] could embark on an essay about lost innocence, a comparison between two Oskars, the permanently three-year-old drummer and the voiceless, tearless, drumless hunchback. But that would be an oversimplification and would not do justice to the facts” (Grass 498). However, on two exceptional occasions, the narrator also gives voice, in a false attempt at objectivity, to Oskar’s nurse Bruno Münsterberg, and to an elusive friend, Gottfried von Vittlar, paradoxically further undermining his own credibility. If physically, the multi-voiced narrator remains a three-foot-tall gnome for the most part of the novel (he will grow barely over four feet toward the end of the narrative, around the time he turns thirty), mentally, however, he is born clairaudient, which

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makes any need for learning from the adults’ world superfluous. What Oskar does possess is knowledge; what he does not have, and therefore constantly searches for, is order and clarity. Oskar’s narrative attempts to shed light on the unexplainable events in his life and to bring some semblance of order to historical chaos are constantly undermined by his guilty conscience. Although he is quite evidently innocent of his motherAgnes’s accidental death, of his uncle/ surrogate father Jan Bronski’s capture and execution, as well as of his father Alfred Matzerath’s choking on a pin and getting shot by a Russian soldier, Oskar first denies, then admits to, and is finally acquitted of the murder of Sister Dorothea, who seems to have fallen victim to a crime of passion by a fellow nurse. Oskar’s utter unreliability as a narrator has earned him qualifications such as a “disembodied narrative voice” or a “literary device […] generating possible narratives inviting possible responses” (O’Neill 36). However, I do not think that he is much more of a narrative device than any other literary character; what makes Oskar’s character implausible and his voice unreliable are essentially the incongruities that mark most episodes of the narrative: his refusal to grow after the age of three, his clairaudience, the glass-shattering power of his soundless screams, his oftentimes contradictory versions of one and the same event, his self-identification with historical and religious figures, such as Narses, the sixth-century Romanized Armenian general (significantly also a midget and a eunuch), and the infant Jesus (also possessor of a small “watering can” and of the ability to drum). Consequently, the deliberately unsettled reader tends to conflate the elements of magic in Oskar’s character with the realistic or even naturalistic details of the narrative. As narrator, Oskar undermines the veracity of his stories by constantly reshuffling their component events, and by offering multiple versions of facts based on probabilities. His creative urge and his storytellingcum-drumming talent connect him to the other artist-characters in the novel: Bruno, the string-knot artist and Oskar’s nurse; Klepp, the jazz musician; Bebra, the midget acrobat; Meyn, the storm trooper and trumpet player; and Corporal Lankes, the former nun-killer turned painter,

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all of whom have been described as “hypothetical extensions of Oskar himself ” (O’Neill 37). When Bruno takes over the narrative in the last chapter of Book Three—or, rather, is given a voice whose authenticity is questionable—he remembers Oskar, his patient’s, analogy between a partisan, who alternately puts governments in power and overthrows them as long as he lives, and an artist: “… among all those who go in for politics, your incorrigible partisan, who undermines what he has just set up, is closest to the artist because he consistently rejects what he has just created” (Grass 423). The comparison serves as yet another metaliterary comment on Oskar’s own creativity and its intrinsic dialectic of affirmation and denial. Therefore, what consistently overshadows in importance the authenticity of Oskar’s avatars and of each alternate version of his stories is the very idea of motion and, implicitly, of the relativity of truth. If storytelling produces a string of utterances that cannot be undone but only re-ordered, writing implies starting anew each and every time the whiteness of the paper is “violated.” Significantly, Oskar insists that Bruno fetch him “virgin” and not “white” paper from the store (Grass 16)—also, most likely, anticipating the salesgirl’s reaction to the word. Oskar-the-narrator seems aware of the decisive moment that every writer faces when confronted with a white sheet of paper, the medium through which chaotic, incongruous events are waiting to be ordered in space and time. On the other hand, his nurse Bruno’s medium consists of strings, plaster, knitting needles, and little wooden pedestals. Inspired by Oskar’s fairy tales, Bruno is said to respond to them with knot constructions dipped in plaster and mounted on needles—a possible example of representation of an art form (storytelling) by another (visual plastic art). Other instances of ekphrasis occur in the chapter entitled “The Photograph Album,” in which Oskar weaves stories around pictures of his parents and snapshots from his childhood. “What novel—or what else in the world—can have the epic scope of a photograph album?” he asks before engaging in suggestive dramatizations of several family photos showing his mother, Agnes, his father, Alfred Matzerath, and his mother’s cousin, Jan Bronski (Grass 49). Oskar demystifies their obvious posing

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by describing and interpreting every detail, each movement frozen in time, and at the same time unveiling an ongoing love triangle: In my picture, the three of them are together. They are playing skat. That is, they are holding their cards like well-organized fans, but instead of looking at their trumps and plotting their strategy, they are looking into the camera. Jan’s hand lies flat, except for the raised forefinger, beside a pile of change; Matzerath is digging his nails into the tablecloth; Mama is indulging in a little joke which strikes me as rather good: she has drawn a card and is showing it to the camera lens but not to her fellow players. How easy it is with a single gesture, by merely showing the queen of hearts, to conjure up a symbol that is not too blatant; for who would not swear by the queen of hearts? (Grass 57)

The narrator replicates the photograph while adding narrative depth to it, and creates, by ekphrasis, the literary image of a visual art form. While a photo album in and by itself cannot preserve memories, it can certainly trigger them, or versions thereof, in the beholder’s imagination. Moreover, Oskar is prone to historicizing not only fixed reproductions of images but also live scenes, such as the one describing a rostrum during a Nazi pageant: What is a rostrum? Regardless of whom it is built for, a rostrum must be symmetrical. And that rostrum on our Maiwiese was indeed striking in its symmetry. From back to front: six swastika banners side by side; then a row of flags, pennants, standards; then a row of black-uniformed SS men who clutched their belt buckles during the singing and the speeches; then, seated, several rows of uniformed Party comrades; behind the speaker’s stand more Party comrades, leaders of women’s associations with motherly looks on their faces, representatives of the Senate in civilian garb, guests from the Reich, and the police chief or his representative. (Grass 117–118)

Oskar’s search for order and clarity characterizes his entire narrative; however, by this particular description, he also seems to give readers a glimpse into what Walter Benjamin called the aestheticization of politics

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by Fascism. Consequently, the narrator and his friend Bebra, a midget acrobat, remark that their place should be on the rostrum and not in the audience if they want to avoid becoming subjects to the Nazis’ “violation of the masses” (Benjamin 241). History may well be acted out in front of a rostrum, but its events are choreographed by those occupying a place on it. The German word for “history,” Geschichte, happens to be the same as the one for “story,” which can thus suggest, without any contextual effort at allusion, the overlapping functions of both types of textual representation; however, as it is often the case with literary translations, language games tend to become lost in the arduous process of finding not just the literal but also the figurative and stylistic correspondents. Therefore, when Oskar drums up the world on his tin drum, he both recounts his own story and re-creates the history of the people of Danzig—Germans, Poles, Kashubians, and Jews. Before he starts growing and turning into a hunchback, Oskar is busy “remembering” his grandparents’ and his parents’ past, and building a case for his unique place and role in history. The timeline of Oskar’s narrative extends between a day in the fall of 1899, when his mother, Agnes, was conceived under the multilayered skirts of Anna Bronski by the Kashubian fugitive Joseph Koljaiczek, and the beginning of Germany’s vaunted Wirtschaftswunder in the mid 1950s. If the life of Rushdie’s Saleem determined or, alternately, was impacted by post-independence India’s history, Oskar’s thirty-year journey parallels, overlaps, or intertwines with German, Polish, and world historical events (Rushdie has acknowledged his indebtedness to Grass several times over), marred by cruelty, violence, constant destruction, and death on a mass scale. However, Oskar mentions mostly war violence (for example the siege of the Polish post office, or his father, Alfred Matzerath’s, summary execution, the annihilation of four thousand children refugees by the Russian artillery, etc.), and makes but one reference to the Holocaust, with Mr. Fajngold’s traumatized character, who has lost his entire family in the crematoria of Treblinka. Most of the other deaths described by Oskar (Agnes and Alfred Matzerath’s, Herbert Truczinski’s, Mr. Greff’s, etc.) abound with grotesque details of almost

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Rabelaisian proportions, but the tone of the narrative remains uncannily detached and unemotional. The narrator’s tone is an essential reflection of his contradictory character. Shortly after his birth, Oskar makes up his mind to stop growing lest he should join an adult society of hypocrites tormented by guilt and paralyzed by complacency, and remains, instead, a three-foot tall infant—an arguably efficient physical disguise of innocence and naïveté. However, as much as he would prefer to observe the world from the outside, Oskar is still “incapable of extricating himself fully from the turbulent flow of historical and natural events” (McCarthy 276), because he is, in fact, both an inheritor and an epitomizer of historical guilt and trauma. His physical retardation metonymically suggests the moral pettiness of the times, which has prompted critics to describe the novel as the “story of historical obscenity in our century, told by the very incarnation of the Zeitgeist, whose curriculum vitae corresponds to the author’s only to the extent that the author himself feels that he, too, is a man produced by and typical of his age” (Keele 10). By endowing his main character with an entire legacy of historical knowledge and the reluctance to become (or the pretense of not being) involved in morally reprehensible events, Grass conveys the idea that innocence and forgiveness are impossible—a point that will turn, about four decades later, into an unequivocal indictment of ordinary Germans’ Holocaust complicity in Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners. German collective guilt may well stem from more than a mere attitude of complicity or complacency, especially if one views National Socialism not so much as a “supernatural eruption of evil incarnate,” but rather, as Grass seems to believe, the “coordinated channeling, on a huge scale, of the petty viciousness, the petty hypocrisies, the petty greed and frustration and spite and boredom of very ordinary people, people leading painfully ordinary lives…” (O’Neill 24). Thus, it seems that most Germans not only tolerated, or supported, or followed the Führer, but created him as a proxy—or, at the very least, had inadvertently prepared the socio-psychological conditions that ultimately led to his rise to power. Therefore, Oskar has been described both as an eyewitness and as a personification of the Third Reich (Keele 11);

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moreover, critics have also found certain traits that the character seems to share with Hitler, such as his low-middle-class origin, his Aryan blue eyes, his mediocre artistic talent, and the delusional self-reference as the “savior of his people” (O’Neill 25). Oskar-the-narrator is more than just an arguably omniscient voice of history—he willfully impersonates history itself. Oskar’s character in many ways mirrors the first-person narrator’s, the other Oskar’s, view of history as “totally random, arbitrary, undirected, indifferent—and unchangeable, whether by satire or otherwise” (O’Neill 27), which almost necessarily leads to two compulsive acts of narration: drumming and writing. Thus, the “inmate of a mental hospital” that opens the novel is careful to mention, several times over, the importance of the drum and of his playing it. Eager to start his narrative in a linear, orderly fashion, Oskar tries to establish his ancestry (and implicitly, his identity) by painting a humorously pornographic scene of the first contact between his grandparents, Anna Bronski and Joseph Koljaiczek. As he cannot possibly possess any direct knowledge of events that took place between 1899 and 1924, the year of his birth, Oskar acknowledges the role played by his drum in “remembering” the possible scenarios that he is about to commit to paper: “If I didn’t have my drum, which, when handled adroitly and patiently, remembers all the incidentals that I need to get the essential down on paper, and if I didn’t have the permission of the [hospital] management to drum three or four hours a day, I’d be a poor bastard with nothing to say for my grandparents” (Grass 25). In fact, whenever Oskar “questions” it with his drumsticks, the drum apparently “remembers” and helps him write about an array of plausible events, such as the fate of his grandfather, a fugitive from the law who, in a fit of panic, disappeared between the logs of a raft in the Mottlau river; the “whole truth,” as Oskar puts it, includes a variant in which Koljaiczek was picked up by a Greek tanker; one in which he swam across the river, and became lost in the crowd; one in which he joined a Swedish deep-sea fisherman; and one in which he ended up in Buffalo, New York, and called himself Joe Colchic (Grass 36–37). Between playing the drum (Oskar’s oftentimes compulsive act of recapturing random

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and once in a while grotesquely violent events) and writing (his conscious attempt at ordering and turning experiences into a more or less coherent narrative) extends the gray zone of the traumatic imagination, in which the first-person narrator searches for both Oskar’s identity and his own. The result of his endeavor translates into a conflation of reality with several possible realities, each only as true as the storyteller’s and the readers’ imaginations allow it to be, or, in other words, into an obsessively consistent magical realist effect. By drumming, Oskar both revisits particular events and paints a kaleidoscopic picture of Polish history under German occupation: “When today Oskar, lying or sitting in his hospital bed, but in either case drumming, […] searching for the particulars of a day in September, he cannot help looking for Poland at the same time. How does he look for it? With his drumsticks. Does he also look for Poland with his soul? He looks for it with every organ of his being, but the soul is not an organ” (Grass 107). Oskar knows that recovering Polish suffering with his soul would entail undoing the traumatic memories and the knowledge that he has either inherited or accumulated in his thirty years of life. Because of his persistent drumming up of the world, Oskar has also been described as the “incarnation of the rhythmic principle” enunciated by Nietzsche: “The human being is a creature of rhythms, constituting all events as rhythmic phenomena. It is his way of exercising power over sensations” (cited by McCarthy 285). In this paradigm, if drumming seems to set the pace of events, the act of writing establishes their coherence and flow. Moreover, as a possible symbol of the human conscience, the drum might also represent the “medium of reconciliation between violence and innocence, chaos and order” (McCarthy 289), and as such, explains the reason that the novel has been included in the artistic movement of the so-called Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or “coming to terms with the past.” No other theme has probably been more widely used in post-World War II German literature—possibly yet another indication of the cathartic effect of writing as an act of working through individual and historical trauma. Just as Oskar purges himself of the unbearable load of knowledge inherited at his birth by “drumming up the world,” the author himself

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must also have experienced a kind of confessional catharsis while writing the novel. Moreover, considering the narrator’s unreliability and his guilt-ridden conscience, one might say that Grass’s public voice, up until a fateful BBC interview in 2006, had also lacked complete candidness.83 Ironically, the author might have found himself in a position similar to that of the patrons of Ferdinand Schmuh’s Onion Cellar café in The Tin Drum. Schmuh’s guests are made to slice the specialty of the house, onions, “smaller and smaller until the juice—what did the onion juice do? It did what the world and the sorrows of the world could not do: it brought forth a round, human tear. It made them cry. At least they were able to cry again. […] The tears flowed and washed everything away” (Grass 525). Acknowledging one’s guilt and facing one’s traumatic memories (in this case, perpetrator’s trauma) requires, of course, not onion juice but a lot of courage and a strong sense of responsibility. Descriptions of lethal violence with one or more casualties occasionally mark the plot of the novel, albeit in a subdued, casual tone. The narrative tone has been described as “indifferent rather than angry,” and apparently meant to arouse the “reader’s indignation [who] must rush in to fill the moral vacuum left by the protagonist’s [narrator’s] nonchalance” (Simon 23). Oskar either describes scenes of violence that he has witnessed directly, such as the shooting of Alfred Matzerath by a Russian (Kalmuck) soldier, the execution of Jan Bronski and thirty other Polish postal workers, and the random killing of five French nuns on a beach in Normandy, or only mentions indirect accounts of atrocities, such as the burning of more than one hundred crew members during an arson attack on a submarine in the Danzig docks and the massacre by the Russian artillery of four thousand children left behind by retreating Germans in Käsemark. The latter account comes from a lady doctor called to check on Oskar’s condition after his fall into his father’s grave: “You’ll have to excuse me. Haven’t closed an eye in three weeks. I was in Käsemark with a trainload of children from East Prussia. Couldn’t get the kids on the ferry. Only took troops. Four thousand kids. All blown to pieces” (Grass 410–411). Terse and apparently unemotional, the doctor’s tone

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indicates a state of psychic numbing induced by severe trauma, quite similar to Oskar’s tone when describing the traumatic behavior of Mariusz Fajngold, a Holocaust survivor. Having lost his entire family in the crematoria at Treblinka, Mr. Fajngold acts out trauma by occasionally addressing his wife Luba as if she were still a tangible presence, or even the other members of his family by their names: Luba, Lev, Jakub, Berek, Leon, Mendel, and Sonya (Grass 398). The simple enumeration of names that do not belong to any acting characters suggests, in fact, a lot more than the severity of Mr. Fajngold’s trauma of loss: it also, and maybe more importantly, points to a “hole in signification” (Lacan) that Oskar’s narrative skills cannot fill, and implicitly, to a traumatic absence that Grass’s writing attempts but inevitably fails to recover. Along with Oskar, the reader discovers that a discourse meant to represent the Holocaust cannot be built on any rational facts, except for bits and pieces of events ingrained in the survivor- or witness-speaker’s consciousness as traumatic memories. Oskar learns about the whole carloads of carbolic acid, lime, and Lysol that [Mr. Fajngold] had sprayed, strewn, and sprinkled when he was disinfector in Treblinka Concentration Camp. Every day at 2 p.m., in his official capacity as Disinfector Mariusz Fajngold, he had sprinkled Lysol on the camp streets, over the barracks, the shower rooms, the cremating furnaces, the bundles of clothing, over those who were waiting to shower, over those who lay recumbent after their showers, over all that came out of the ovens and all who were about to go in. He listed the names, for he knew them all. (Grass 413)

The suggestive power of an otherwise frivolous official title, “Disinfector,” and of apparently insignificant words or phrases such as “bundles of clothing,” “shower rooms,” and “recumbent”—and even the compound pronoun “all that,” as opposed to “all who”—can come alive only in the specific context and atmosphere of Oskar’s narrative. The synecdochic relationship that transforms the blandness of the parts into the terrifying concreteness of the whole is the exclusive result of the author’s and the reader’s traumatic imagination.

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While imagination generally operates by associations, the traumatic imagination particularly depends on them by necessity. Traumatized speakers usually find the linguistic repertoire at their disposal inadequate to express extreme events, and come to discover the daunting emptiness of words. However, finding the “right” word can quite easily lead to retraumatization, which might be the reason that Grass’s self-conscious narrator becomes frustrated at his inability to find alternate words— instead of the semantically “right” word—when describing a shooting: All that is so easily written: machine guns, double turrets. Might it not just as well have been a shower, a hailstorm, the approach of a late summer storm similar to the storm that had accompanied my birth? […] With the sounds still fresh in my ears, I guessed right and like all sleepyheads called a spade a spade: They are shooting, I said to myself. (Grass 222)

Calling shooting a “shooting” does not satisfy Oskar’s writerly ego simply because it is too “easy,” descriptive, and emotionless. However, when the violence of an armed confrontation, such as the scene of the German attack on the Polish post office, challenges Oskar’s storytelling skills once again, Grass endows his narrator with the strangely elusive language of violence that I have previously exemplified in the writings of Gabriel García Márquez (the massacre of striking banana workers in Ciénaga) and Salmon Rushdie (the bloody ending of a peaceful demonstration in Amritsar). The following scene portrays the lethal weapons that are about to kill many of the defenders of the Polish post office: [The Poles] were always kissing ladies’ hands and never till it was too late did they notice that what they were kissing was not a lady’s languid fingers but the unrouged muzzle of a field howitzer. And the daughter of the Krupps proceeded to vent her feelings. She smacked her lips, gave a corny yet convincing imitation of battle noises, the kind you hear in newsreels. She peppered the front door of the post office, burst into the main hall, and tried to take a bite out of the staircase, so that no one would be able to move up or down. Then came her retinue: machine guns and two trim little armored reconnaissance cars with their names painted

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on them. […] Two young ladies intent on culture and so eager to visit the castle, but the castle was still closed. Spoiled young things they were, just couldn’t wait to get in. Bursting with impatience, they cast penetrating, lead-grey glances, all of the same caliber, into every visible room in the castle, making things hot, cold, and uncomfortable for the castellans. (Grass 232–234)

Oskar’s incongruous associations (corny lady/field howitzer, young ladies/armored cars, grey glances/lead bullets, etc.) work because they fill an emotional vacuum created by his own casual—and in this example sarcastic—narrative tone. In both the narrator’s and the reader’s imaginations, if the scene is not about howitzer projectiles and armoredcar bullets ripping into the Polish post office, it might just as well be about spoiled young ladies forcing their way into a castle on a whim, just to make things a little more exciting, that is, “hot, cold, and uncomfortable.” Acts of memory, even fictional ones, do not target events but rather the human feelings involved in experiencing them. After the battle and Jan Bronski’s eventual execution, Oskar will feel guilty for having made his uncle return to the besieged post office only to ask janitor Kobyella to fix his drum. In several instances, Oskar seems to insist on convincing the reader of his guilt for having caused, indirectly, the deaths of Agnes, his mother, and that of Alfred Matzerath and Jan Bronski, his “two” fathers. However, he alternately maintains his innocence in the death of Sister Dorothea, then admits to murdering her after his friend Gottfried von Vittlar’s deposition, and finally suggests his innocence again, after the real murderess is revealed. Oskar’s postmodernist narrative games are meant to foreground the relativity of truth and the impossibility of innocence. “It is not true that when the heart is full, the eyes necessarily overflow,” Oskar ponders, “some people can never manage it, especially in our century, which in spite of all the suffering and sorrow will surely be known to posterity as the tearless century” (Grass 525). A “tearless century” is one that has not yet managed to acknowledge collective guilt and to cope with historical trauma; it is a shock chronotope in need of new modes of representation, of alternate possibilities, and sometimes, of magic.

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The novel has been described as an example of magical realism based on its “alternation between the empirical and the imaginable” (McCarthy 271) or its “blend of dreary reality and spectacular fantasy” (Simon 23). For example, when he evokes the Polish Campaign of 1939, Oskar imagines the cavalry gather around Pan Kichot, a Polish DonQuixote figure, “a pure-blooded Pole, a noble, mournful figure, who has taught his Uhlans to kiss ladies’ hands on horseback, ah, with what aplomb they will kiss the hand of death, as though death were a lady” (Grass 251). The description of the Uhlans’ charge against the German tanks, “stallions from the studs of the Krupps von Bohlen und Halbach, no nobler steeds in all the world,” intertwines the chivalrous atmosphere of a medieval romance with intertextual references to Cervantes’ “eccentric knight in love with death,” who cries to his cavalry: “Ye noble Poles on horseback, these are no steel tanks, they are mere windmills or sheep, I summon you to kiss the lady’s hand” (Grass 251).84 The feel of unreality in the entire description of the battle is compelling, and indicates that Grass’s combat trauma must have been apt to produce a metaphorical text similar in its suggestive power to García Márquez’s and Rushdie’s magical realist texts evoking historical violence. The image of the squadrons of Uhlans riding out against the “grey steel foe, [and] adding another dash of red to the sunset glow,” relies on the double connotation of “red,” which pertains both to one of the basic colors of the Uhlans’ uniform, and to the bloodshed of the battle (Grass 251). Within the dichotomy of a connotative, mythic-magical language of violence and a terse, data-laden “official” historical report, the former element characteristically outweighs the latter in this type of writing. A “dash of red” may thus suggest an image—and create a felt reality—of human bodies blown to pieces in a significantly more powerful manner than numbers or military-tactical data would. In one of his self-conscious moments of literary-artistic introspection, the storyteller himself seems to acknowledge the dichotomy of fictional/poetic language and objective/historical discourse: “Oskar hopes to be forgiven for the poetic effects. He might have done better to give figures, to enumerate the casualties of the Polish cavalry, to commemorate the so-called Polish Campaign with dry but

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eloquent statistics. Or another solution might be to let the poem stand but append a note” (Grass 251–252). One could, in fact, envisage Oskar’s “poem” as a painting that challenges its audience to re-create a narrative based on just a single slice of reality frozen in time; in such a context, the note would be a historical caption meant to ekphrastically expand the two-dimensional image. The arguably traumatized drummer can muster the strength to drum up only images, sounds, and emotions—and prefers to leave the notes up to the reader to flesh out his stories. In addition to his inherited wisdom, Oskar’s experiencing and witnessing of wartime horrors account for his traumatized self and destructive behavior, as well as his propensity for narrative inventions—which does not mean, however, that he “simply lost his mind,” as others have ventured to explain, “as the result of horrors experienced during the war years,” nor is he “completely insane, as his unbelievable narrative makes abundantly clear” (O’Neill 29). Evidently, Oskar may also be viewed as the fictional voice and alter ego of his creator, that is, as an “author, whose job is to invent things, including unbelievable things…” (O’Neill 30), such as the destructive effects of his—at first audible, then silent— screaming. “I screamed,” Oskar boasts, “and when I screamed, valuable articles burst into bits; I had the gift of shattering glass with my singing; my screams demolished vases, my singing made windowpanes crumple…” (Grass 64). Possibly displaying hyperarousal, one of the main symptoms of trauma, Oskar is “predominantly a destructive force” (Maurer 109), and his rebellious voice, while at first directed against whoever tries to take away his drum, becomes unleashed at apparently random targets, depending on the gnome’s disposition. However, the occasions and the specific targets do carry subtextual connotations that seem to foretell atrocities of the war years or the flare-ups of violence that preceded them. For instance, when Agnes takes her five-year-old son, who has not grown one inch since he turned three (1924–1929), to Dr. Hollatz, Oskar shatters the doctor’s collection of bottled snakes, toads, and embryos, and pops all of his test tubes (Grass 70–71). The episode constitutes a veiled allusion at the “scientific” experiments carried out by Nazi doctors on “expendable” live human subjects in the

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concentration camps. Oskar will later perfect his glass-shattering scream by making it inaudible, and himself undetectable; he first unleashes his soundless cry at the lobby windows and the doors of the Stadt-Theater from the top of the Stockturm (Grass 105). The newly acquired skill is then used to shatter or to cut holes in shop windows in order to lure nightly passers-by—including, on one occasion, his own uncle, Jan Bronski—to break in and steal (Grass 127–133). The connection to the historical events of November 9–10, 1938, is hard to miss: the Nazi antiJewish furor that was unleashed on the so-called Reich Crystal Night, Reichskristallnacht, when Jewish shops and homes were ransacked and burned, marked the beginning of the open persecution of Germany’s Jewish population, which would ultimately lead to the Holocaust. The gnome conjures historical violence with the knowledge of which he was born. Moreover, when Oskar’s supernatural power intrudes in, and disrupts, an apparently peaceful scene, such as his first day of school, there is always a plausible, even if not always apparent, reason for it to do so. For example, events spin out of control when the teacher, Miss Spollenhauer, makes the class repeat the weekly schedule after her in one voice, and Oskar’s drumming picks up in intensity. When, barely concealing her irritation, she attempts to take his drum away, the inevitable happens, and the child’s scream breaks all classroom windows (Grass 80–83). Completely losing her composure, Miss Spollenhauer unconsciously adds insult to injury by striking hard on Oskar’s desk with a cane and then hitting his drum, upon which Oskar raises the pitch of his voice, and pulverizes both lenses of her spectacles. Besides his constant reluctance to part with his drum, there seems to be yet another reason for Oskar’s disruptive behavior and rebellious attitude: the drummer just cannot be tied down by the arbitrary order imposed through a class schedule, and by extension, a system of indoctrination geared to mass obedience and efficiency. At the center of the chapter, entitled “The Schedule,” lies the narrator’s stubborn aloofness and simmering anger. Later in the novel, the drummer will reorient his fury toward the Nazi pageantry: “Yes, my work was destructive. And what I did not defeat with my drum, I killed

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with my voice. In the daytime I assaulted the symmetry of rostrums…” (Grass 124–125). The rostrums seating mostly party, army, police, and administration officials were evidently the concentrated version of the Nazi power apparatus. The district headquarters of the Hitler Youth will also be battered by Oskar’s demolishing scream (Grass 373), suggesting both the character’s personal frustrations and his thirst for revenge against historical forces beyond his control. Furthermore, even the ornaments of a Christmas tree, “balls, bells, light refracting silvery soap bubbles,” are shattered to dust (Grass 260) because of the immediate and admitted reason that Oskar cannot get his drum back, and the larger reason that he cannot stand any kind of authority jeopardizing his independent spirit. Oskar’s magic works on two levels: one personal, completing the contours of his character by exaggeration; and one macro-social or historical, emphasizing violent events by metonymy. Just as Kovalyov’s nose offers Nikolai Gogol’s narrator an opportunity to portray the absurdity of nineteenth-century Russian bureaucracy (“The Nose”), Oskar’s drumming and destructive voice both evoke and destroy a traumatizing historical reality; both fantastic elements are part of an overwhelmingly realistic narrative, and constitute the main sources of its thematic relevance. If a shallow Kovalyov is nobody without his nose, an angry, rebellious Oskar, without his insistent drumming and piercing voice, would most likely shrink into an ordinary gnome with no storytelling powers whatsoever. Therefore, to look at the “fundamental division in The Tin Drum between the material in it that is purely fantastic and that rooted in a recognizable reality” (Maurer 101) may only lead to missing not only its operative writing style (magical realism) but also its overarching theme (the relativity of historical truth). It has also been noted that “Oskar’s position and his magical powers of drum and voice are somehow cut from the same material as Ulysses’ ability to subdue Cyclops and the Sirens” (Maurer 103). The analogy would probably stand if Oskar’s screams were directed at Valkyries instead of Nazis and the Hitler Youth. Although a part of the fantastic, magical realism operates as a primarily realistic writing mode, conflating the explainable and

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the natural with the unexplainable and the supernatural as if they were intrinsic parts of each other, neither parallel nor alternate realities—just one complex, ambiguous reality whose mystery the reader is invited to ponder and not necessarily to decipher. Therefore, Oskar is who he is because of his supernatural powers, or, as the split-voiced narrator confesses, “to me Oskar’s voice, even more than his drum, was proof of my existence and as such forever new; for as long as I sang glass to pieces, I existed” (Grass 362). Oskar’s stories are mostly personal, with occasional outward projections against Germany’s early- and mid-twentieth-century historical background, or, conversely, with random interferences from mostly violent wartime events. Although essentially marked by war traumata, the shock chronotope that The Tin Drum tries to recover does not portray any actual combat scenes, even if certain episodes show soldiers (the Russians overseeing Alfred Matzerath’s funeral) or the Atlantic Wall in Normandy (visited by Oskar and his friends Bebra and Roswitha right before the allied invasion). Most war references come from radio news bulletins or occasional witnesses (the lady doctor who witnessed the massacre of four thousand refugee children), which does not mean that war is not the most poignant presence and source of suffering in the novel. While characters might not participate in it, war still becomes a constant participant and a traumatizing factor in their individual lives. Oskar-the-narrator’s magical storytelling tries in vain to break the spell by putting order and a semblance of meaning into the chaos of events, and by the end of the narrative, he needs to admit to defeat and to recognize that words have failed him. * Like Günter Grass, Tim O’Brien has also experienced war firsthand— albeit another kind of war, about one generation later. If World War II remains a locally limited and mostly invisible traumatizing factor in the lives of most characters in The Tin Drum (but, nevertheless, defining the entire shock chronotope), the Vietnam War represents the quintessential meat- (and mind-) grinder to the soldier-characters in O’Brien’s Going

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after Cacciato (1978). O’Brien is considered one of the most important soldier-authors of the Vietnam generation and one of the most notable postmodernist writers in the United States, particularly for “his exploration from multiple perspectives of the problematic nature of truth and reality” (Herzog, Tim O’Brien 78). Because of his combination of gritty realism with dreamlike images, O’Brien has also been described as a “postmodernist classic of magical realism” (Philip Beidler, as cited in Herzog, Tim O’Brien 80), a classification from which he has consistently distanced himself by arguing that fantasies and daydreams are real, and thus, paradoxically, confirming rather than denying his use of magical realism—a primarily realistic writing mode in which fantasies are, indeed, real. His misunderstanding of the magical element and possible underestimation of the realism component of the term notwithstanding, O’Brien has proven to be a self-conscious writer, an accomplished master of his craft, acutely aware of the role played by his war trauma and persistent feeling of guilt in his writing, and mindful of his artistic responsibilities of bearing witness to the horrors of war. O’Brien’s traumata—not all of which are traceable to his war experiences—find a terrifyingly accurate reflection in most of his soldier-characters. Even before he left for Vietnam in 1969 (his tour lasted until 1970), O’Brien had had, by his own admission, a complicated relationship with his father—an alcoholic given to abusive ridiculing and teasing of his son—a source of latent trauma that would only exacerbate the feeling of guilt incurred from O’Brien’s participation in the Vietnam War. Significantly, in an interview with Tobey C. Herzog, the writer qualifies the father theme as “incredibly important” in his work, alongside those of history, war, loneliness, and alienation (Herzog, Writing Vietnam 95). His father’s pro-war attitude, regularly displayed at the family dinner table, and the overall jingoistic mindset of Worthington, Minnesota, where the O’Brien family has lived since Tim was twelve, constituted the main sources of the moral pressure that ultimately pushed the future writer to join the army at age twenty-one; he could have pleaded for draft exception as a student, but did not, lest he should disappoint his family and community. O’Brien has consistently discarded the idea of

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“lost innocence” for the simple reason that he did not go to war as “an innocent” but as “a guilt”: “I was not an innocent, I was a ‘guilt.’ I knew that the war was wrong” (99). After the end of the war, in response to the literature of 1972–1973 that mostly glorified the “patriotic grunt experience,” O’Brien felt the urge to show the experience of Vietnam “through the eyes of a soldier who acknowledged the obvious: we were killing civilians more than we were killing the enemy” (111); his unorthodox, anti-mainstream literary credo may also be viewed as an expression of perpetrator’s guilt, another common cause of trauma. It would seem that the acknowledgment of guilt has become a coping mechanism that has helped O’Brien adjust to civilian life better than other Vietnam veterans did after returning home. In the same interview with Herzog, O’Brien admitted that “acknowledging the guilt helped [him], from the start, helped [him] adjust, as opposed to kidding [him] self and finding out later” (112). It should be noted, however, that “kidding” oneself, particularly one’s traumatized self, is not a matter of personal choice. As a delayed response to extreme experiences, trauma does not allow consciousness either to shut out or to turn traumatic memories into narrative memories, which makes complete healing impossible regardless of the therapy applied. Moreover, dealing with perpetrator’s guilt can never be the same as working through trauma suffered as a victim. O’Brien even attributes, in a somewhat naïve manner, an upside to PTSD: “[The effects of trauma] are not all terrible. It’s good to have a little post-traumatic stress syndrome, so you won’t get stressed again, so you won’t get traumatized again. It’s like putting your hand in a fire. You do it enough times and you’re going to be careful of fire” (112). The arguably unintentional reference to “what-doesn’t-kill-you-makesyou-stronger” cliché oversimplifies the nature of the disorder in at least a couple of aspects: first, the possibility of re-traumatization can never be excluded, regardless of the severity of the initial trauma; and second, traumatization is never intentional, and cannot bear comparison with “putting [one’s] hand in fire.” Although the behavior of a returning war veteran might often be viewed as “tough” in a normal, civilian environment, it is, in fact, the trauma symptom of withdrawal.

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Mustering enough strength to write about war trauma, O’Brien has put his hand in the fire more than just once; in the process of writing his works, he has consciously assumed the risk of testing the effectiveness of fictional catharsis. Psychological healing by means of narrative recovery of the origins of one’s trauma necessarily implies their revisitation, which, in turn, can quite easily (and counterproductively) lead to re-traumatization; consequently, narrative recovery might, in fact, sometimes work as a re-covery of trauma. In Going after Cacciato, Paul Berlin’s imaginary narrative, which undermines the reality of the actual plot (but at the same time complements it by filling its blank, ineffable spots), is meant to serve the same purpose for the character as writing the novel did for O’Brien: to work through perpetrator’s guilt and the trauma of victimhood (perpetrator’s trauma). However, Paul Berlin’s attempt, unlike O’Brien’s, fails because his dream “has no audience but his own imagination; he is left trapped within the war, aware of his traumatization but unable to share his enlightenment with others” (Heberle 143). O’Brien’s narrative has at least found an audience and a validation, whereas Paul Berlin’s last dream episode (breaking into Cacciato’s hotel room in Paris) takes the character back to the scene of his initial breakdown: preparing the ambush on the deserter Cacciato. The author’s and the character’s creative dream-therapy would then suggest that the subject of the novel is not so much trauma as, rather, the traumatic imagination— the very medium that translates trauma into an artistic chronotope. Although a delayed response to past events, survivor’s trauma is also an empathic anticipation of its own future recurrence. “Witnessing the sudden and unexpected death of others anticipates one’s own, and life as usual cannot be easily resumed after the survivor has seen the end of his or her own story” (Heberle 14). Significantly, the first six sentences in the novel casually list the names of seven dead—Billy Boy Watkins, Frenchie Tucker, Lieutenant Sidney Martin, Pederson, Rudy Chassler, Buff, and Ready Mix—with little or no reference to the causes or circumstances of death, except for the “field of battle,” “tunnels,” and “paddies,” that is, details which may or may not immediately suggest Vietnam, depending on the reader’s perceptiveness (O’Brien 1). The eerily detached, matter-of-fact

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tone of the third-person narrator (already apparent in the opening understatement, “It was a bad time”) suggests the main character’s traumatic symptom of psychic or emotional numbing and his paralyzing fear of death, which, in fact, becomes explicit in life-and-death situations in which Paul Berlin soils himself. Blocking out specific details and splitting up some of the accounts of his comrades’ deaths also speak for the elusive nature of traumatic memories. As Paul Berlin randomly recalls each individual death, the scene descriptions either start right after, or end immediately before a soldier dies: for example, Frenchie Tucker’s dead body has just been dragged out of a Vietcong tunnel (O’Brien 65–66); Buff is already being wrapped in a poncho, and his helmet emptied of his head (280–285); after crawling into the tunnel to retrieve Frenchie Tucker’s body, Bernie Lynn receives a throat wound, and is dying in Doc Peret’s arms (66–69); mowed down by the gunners of the same Chinook helicopter that has just dropped him off in the combat zone, Jim Pederson is shooting back at them (131–132); and after his foot is blown off by a mine, Billy Boy Watkins panics, and apparently dies of a heart attack (216–217). “This truncation [of scenes] has the antitraumatic, self-protective function of stopping just short of physical atrocity, but it also resurrects the individual while he is still alive. […] Remembering transforms the catalog into stories that memorialize the dead so that the survivor’s life can go on” (Heberle 116). Paul Berlin himself, the de facto narrator of the novel (whose point of view is expressed by the third-person narrative voice), becomes painfully aware of the importance of order and linearity in his recollections: “The order of things—chronologies—that was the hard part. Long stretches of silence, dullness, long nights and endless days on the march, and sometimes the truly bad times. Pederson, Buff, Frenchie Tucker, Bernie Lynn. But what was the order? […] And what was it now– November-the-what?” (O’Brien 47). Paul Berlin is just about to discover the pain inherent in the daunting process of transforming traumatic memories into coherent narratives. Unlike Paul Berlin, who consciously creates an imaginary scenario in order to work through combat trauma and the moral sense of guilt and victimhood, Lieutenant Corson has apparently never managed to put the Korean War behind him; in fact, he has been missing it for the past fourteen

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“dull years,” soaked in whiskey and nostalgia (O’Brien 2). The causes of his fatigue are believed to be age, dysentery, and “something else”—just another disease that the narrator cannot or cannot bring himself to name (34), but which Doc Peret, the squad’s medic and the novel’s raisonneur, eventually will. “Nostalgia: the pain of returning home. And the ache that comes from thinking about it. See my drift? The old man’s basic disease is homesickness. Nostalgia for the goddamned war, the army, the lifer’s life. And the dysentery, the fever, it’s just a symptom of the real sickness” (183–184). The sparse textual references indicate that Lieutenant Corson is, in fact, acting out a more than fourteen-year-old trauma, and that his prosthetic, traumatized self is incompatible with the new type of trauma represented by Vietnam; therefore, returning home does not imply a possible readjustment to a civilian lifestyle, but a much desired revisitation of the initial locus of trauma. The character’s traumatized behavior fits into the category of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms that the American Psychological Association (APA) defines as constriction, “the shutting down of physiological, emotional, and cognitive responses,” and which “resembles affectless hypnotic trance states in which time and selfconsciousness seem to dissolve” (Heberle 12). Lieutenant Corson’s zombielike identity (he is, after all, a walking dead of the Korean War) is most likely intended to represent the transformation awaiting all the other soldiers in Paul Berlin’s squad several years down the road, provided they survive Vietnam. O’Brien’s real concern in Going after Cacciato was not so much Vietnam as, by his own admission, “the difficulty of doing right, the difficulty of saying no to a war” (Schroeder 137). The media spectacle that accompanied the war in the 1960s and the early 1970s has turned Vietnam into a synecdoche for an unjust war and perhaps the severest collective trauma in American history—hence O’Brien’s reluctance to limit the scope of his novel’s moral message to a specific war. The distinction between “Vietnam” and “Viet Nam” is more than orthographic as it pertains to the substance of both signifiers: the former, ideological in nature, refers to “the futilely destructive American military, political, and economic intervention in Southeast Asia and its cultural and political ramifications

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within the United States and elsewhere,” while the latter designates “the nation that won the war and has a history and culture that transcends ‘Vietnam’ ” (Renny Christopher as cited in Heberle xviii). Significantly, O’Brien’s novel ironically suggests the immoral economic interests of the American military-industrial complex in prolonging a profitable war. When Lieutenant Corson radios back to base that the squad is in pursuit of the enemy, not of Cacciato (Corson is unwilling to take blame for a case of desertion in his unit), a radio-voice inquires whether gunships are needed. After the lieutenant turns down both gunships and artillery support, the radio-voice sounds disappointed, and playfully assumes the role of a pushy telemarketer: “We got a real bargain going on arty [artillery] this week—two for the price of one, no strings and a warranty to boot. First-class ordnance, real sweet stuff. See we got this terrific batch of 155 in, a real shitload of it, so we got to go heavy on volume. Keeps the prices down” (O’Brien 12). The use of commercial jargon with reference to extremely lethal weaponry conveys not only the author’s satirical message but also the anonymous character’s gross desensitization, his immunity to the horror that he is peddling. A similar case of desensitization, or emotional numbing, can be noticed among the vague references to Cacciato’s character. The narrator’s thrifty use of details is intentional: Cacciato is just another guy, albeit one who musters enough courage, or is reckless enough, to leave the war behind. O’Brien’s inspiration for Cacciato was apparently a soldier called Kline, whom he had met in basic training, a “klutzy guy with tiny beady eyes” (Schroeder 143). However, the character’s klutziness goes well beyond his clumsiness: it borders on the monstrous. Before his desertion, Cacciato used to carry around a photo album wrapped in plastic, whose cover reads “VUES OF VIETNAM.” In his search for clues, Paul Berlin now finds it, and notices the chronological order of the hundred-odd pictures in it; they show Cacciato’s father, mother, and twin sisters, “dressed for XMAS EVE, printed below the snapshots in red ink.” The family photos and domestic snapshots of “Cacciato smiling and shoveling snow, […] Cacciato in fatigues, Cacciato home on leave” are followed by a warrior pose suggesting the numbing effect of the atrocity of war: “Cacciato

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squatting beside the corpse of a shot-dead VC in green pajamas, Cacciato holding up the dead boy’s head by a shock of brilliant black hair, Cacciato smiling” (O’Brien 119–120).85 The artificiality and the incongruity of the poses do not help clarify Cacciato’s identity in the least, so that Paul Berlin is still left with the question, “But who was he?” Cacciato’s apparent insensitivity to the shocking reality of the combat zone is suggested several times in Paul Berlin’s and the other squad members’ random, asynchronous recollections. Among Cacciato’s “pretty brave stuff” there was the time when “he dragged that dink out of her bunker” and “the time he shot that kid—all those teeth” (O’Brien 15). Also, after Buff’s body has been flown out by chopper, Paul Berlin watches, awestruck, at the casualness with which Cacciato retrieves the fallen comrade’s helmet: “[Cacciato] stepped over a log, stopped, and then, like a woman emptying her wash basin, heaved Buff’s face into the tall, crisp grass. […] He rinsed the helmet under his canteen, wiped it with his shirt, and tied it to his rucksack. Smiling, he took out a stick of gum and unwrapped it and began chewing” (O’Brien 285). The narrator’s uncanny attention to detail, to the character’s every motion (rinsing, wiping, tying, unwrapping, chewing), is in itself indicative of the severe battlefield trauma that Paul Berlin is still trying to work through. (Although the narrative voice is not his, the point of view is.) Even the fake booby trap that Cacciato sets up to slow down his pursuers accounts for his apparent obliviousness to suffering and trauma. As Stink Harris trips it, there is no explosion but only smoke spreading around. In shock, Harris falls to his knees, crying, while Paul Berlin soils himself; he can smell and feel his own urine drenching his thighs. Two hundred meters away, Cacciato watches from the top of a small hill, “hands in his pockets, patient, serene, not at all frightened. He might have been waiting for a bus” (18–20). Whether Cacciato has ultimately discovered the monster in him—or acknowledged the “horror” in a manner similar to Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz—and consequently decided to assume the risk of being courtmartialed by deserting remains debatable, because details about his personality and his eventual fate are sparse, as if Paul Berlin’s memory has instinctually shut them out.

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In one of Paul Berlin’s recollections of an earlier scene of war violence (before Cacciato’s desertion), which describes the aftermath of an extended land and air attack on a mountain nicknamed the World’s Greatest Lake Country, Cacciato’s eccentric behavior speaks again for a traumatized self’s need of normality in the middle of horror. The name of the mountain has been inspired by its many craters, the result of several hours of bombing. The craters are now filled with rain water and dead bodies: The mountains were taken. And in the mountains they found the dead. They found bomb craters full of the dead—scrawny little men, many of them burned, and the stench was terrible. Nothing moved. The corpses lay in heaps, some still kneeling over their guns. There was great silence. So they spent the night among the dead, and in the morning they began counting bodies, which were sometimes countable only by the heads. (O’Brien 177)

The shocking incongruity between the horrific reality of the landscape and the idyllic, familiar nickname attributed to it reveals naming itself as an attempt to reestablish a feeling of normality in a context where nothing is normal, or as a process of working through trauma by making the extraordinary sound ordinary. It is here that Paul Berlin finds Cacciato fishing, focused and undisturbed, rejoicing over imaginary bites and his discovery of the right technique (237–241). The floating dead “scrawny little men” are invisible in Lake Country. The invisibility of the Vietnamese Other in the eyes of the American soldiers is due to a number of unfamiliar cultural markers, the most important of which is language. “Not knowing the language, they did not know the people” (261), the narrator explains, echoing the voice of Paul Berlin’s guilty conscience. Guilt comes from aggressive behavior, aggressiveness from fear, fear from distrust, distrust from ignorance, and ignorance from lack of communication; it is this causal link that Paul Berlin ponders in the chapter “The Things They Didn’t Know,” eager to figure out the identity of the Vietnamese and to tell them that he “was no tyrant, no pig, no Yankee killer,” that he was innocent, that he “had no

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enemies,” that he “had wronged no one,” and that he “was not guilty of wrong intentions” (263). After sixteen repetitions of the phrase “they did not know” throughout its last section alone, the chapter concludes with a statement on moral ignorance: “Magic, mystery, ghosts and incense, whispers in the dark, strange tongues and strange smells, uncertainties never articulated in war stories, emotion squandered on ignorance. They did not know good from evil” (271). The exculpatory tone seems to imply not only the need for atonement of a guilty conscience, but also the anger and the despair caused by the subject’s utter impotence, by the paralysis of his will. Reflecting Paul Berlin’s traumatized self, the narrative constitutes itself both as an effect of trauma and as a means of recovering it. The language that effectively recovers the “magic, mystery, ghosts and incense, whispers in the dark, strange tongues and strange smells” of the original experience combines the gritty realism of scenes of violence with the flights of fantasy of the witness-narrator’s imagination. Thus, the three basic tense forms of “flee” and “fly” form confusing strings of signification in Paul Berlin’s mind—“flee, fly, flew, fled” or sometimes “flee, fly, flown”–as if the character tried to understand whether flying off into an imaginary world of “possibilities” and fleeing from war (i.e., deserting) amount to the same kind of moral act (O’Brien 177–178). No one in the squad seems to know whether to follow Cacciato to Paris, and thus leave behind an unjust and immoral war, or chase a deserter to capture and make him pay for his betrayal of the unquestionable principle of duty; the moral double-bind created by Cacciato becomes the squad’s Catch-22. However, as O’Brien once recognized, “[t]he very themes of the book [Going after Cacciato] are imagination and memory” (Schroeder 135), rather than war, just as Conrad’s books are not about the sea. Besides reflecting upon itself as theme, imagination— and in particular the traumatic imagination—also acquires a “heuristic power” in O’Brien’s war narrative, reinforcing his declared “faith in the fertility of dream” (O’Brien, “The Magic Show” 179). Nevertheless, to discover the feel of a past experience by storytelling—or, as in the case of the traumatic imagination, to recover it—does not mean to explain the

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past but “rather to create and to perform miracles of the imagination” (183) in a manner similar to the workings of magic. Ironically, O’Brien has shown himself adamantly against recognizing any use of magical realism. Asked by Eric James Schroeder whether he was influenced by Gabriel García Márquez, O’Brien candidly admitted that he had not read him—in fact, that he had “hated” One Hundred Years of Solitude so much that he could not read more than three pages of it—but mentioned his admiration for Jorge Luis Borges (Schroeder 129–130).86 The irony lies in the fact that, in one of his essays, O’Brien intuitively and quite accurately, describes the magical realist writing process: The writer of fiction, like the shaman, serves as a medium of sorts between two different worlds—the world of ordinary reality and the extraordinary world of the imagination. In this capacity, the writer often enters a trancelike state of his own. […] This is the sensation I get—both physical and emotional—as a waking dream unfolds into words and as the words unfold into a piece of fiction. Half in the embodied world, half in a world where bodies are superfluous. […] Whatever we call this process—imagination, fantasy, self-hypnosis, creativity—I know from my own life that it is both magical and real. […] The more I write and the more I dream, the more I accept this notion of the writer as a medium between two planes of being—the ordinary and the extraordinary—the embodied world of flesh, the disembodied world of idea and morality and spirit. (“The Magic Show” 178–179)

What O’Brien acknowledges from his own life to be both magical and real is, in fact, the writer’s traumatic imagination, the “flight simulator” that is called upon to remodel the world by evoking a version of it that has never been recovered as narrative memory. In the simulated reality of fiction, only emotions and imaginary replicas of the physical universe can pass for “real,” making it an ideal medium of reflection on truth and morality. An imperfect avatar of O’Brien, Paul Berlin simulates the author’s effort to transform traumatic memories into a cohesive, chronological, and meaningful narrative. However, as also noted by others, the character’s

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traumatization is so severe that he cannot recapture the memory of what has happened to Cacciato, and his fantasy “ultimately leads back to the same blank place in [his] consciousness that it had attempted to satisfy” (Heberle 123). Both the author’s and his character’s fictional endeavors can thus be viewed as deliberate processes of working through war traumata by integrating fantasy into the virtual reality of the combat zone, whose horrors would hardly be describable by the mimetic devices of traditional realism. At the same time, the author and his partial double do not intend to distort reality by forcing their raw experiences into a factual matrix, but attempt, rather, to convey the felt reality of war as they have witnessed it. In his interview with Schroeder, O’Brien remarked that the tendency of every storyteller, sometimes intentional and sometimes not, is to “hype up the [initial] story’s intensity to make [one’s] story equal to what [one] felt personally. And so [one] rev[s] up detail, heighten[s] it, so as to create an emotion in the listener equivalent to the emotion [one] felt, this great fear” (131). Whether it is Paul Berlin’s or the author’s traumatic imagination, the ultimate result of their fictional catharses, by means of blending and complementing real experiences with contingent scenarios, is a felt reality of wartime horror. The magical elements do not undermine the reality of the narrative because, as the author himself explains, “letting one’s imagination heighten detail is part of what fiction writing is about. It’s not lying. It’s trying to produce story detail which will somehow get at a felt experience” (Schroeder 131). The twofold ontological status of magical realism, which evokes both living a dream and dreaming in a state of wakefulness, allows the author’s (and the character’s) traumatized consciousness to create a narrative that will fill the blank spots and bridge the caesura left in the chain of signification by the traumatic event(s). Thus, Paul Berlin’s therapeutic fantasy (Heberle 131), the road to Paris, becomes a sublimated account of the traumatic experiences that the character feels unable to recover, just as O’Brien’s novel in its entirety represents a soldier-author’s struggle with PTSD. The first narrative split occurs right after Cacciato’s cruel prank of planting fake booby traps (smoke grenades) in his pursuers’ way. When

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Stink Harris trips one of them, terror overcomes the entire squad, Harris falls to his knees bawling, and Paul Berlin loses control over his bladder. As the chase continues, Paul Berlin finds himself “pretending, in a wishful sort of way, that before long the war would reach a climax beyond which everything else would seem bland and commonplace. A point at which he could stop being afraid. […] He wasn’t dreaming, or imagining; just pretending. Figuring how it would be, if it were” (O’Brien 25). At this point, however, the character seems to be both acting out and working through trauma—achieving the former by subconsciously repressing his traumatic memories, and the latter by consciously avoiding the terrifying probability of future traumatic scenarios. Memory and imagination, not separately but as a paradigm, literally become Paul Berlin’s devices of survival, and according to the author, they might in fact “apply to all of us whether we are in a war situation or not” (Schroeder 135). Paul Berlin’s introspective moments and self-analyses of his double narrative, one based on remembering past facts, and the other on imagining a hypothetical future, appear mostly in a series of chapters entitled “The Observation Post,” an apparent double-entendre with a literal, military connotation and a figurative, psychological one. In the first observation-post chapter, which follows the open-ended scene of the squad’s decisive ambush on Cacciato, the reassuring repetition of “it was not a dream” or “it wasn’t dreaming” points to the character’s almost paranoid adherence to a reality of “facts,” no matter how elusive these might be. The reader will never find out Cacciato’s fate because Paul Berlin and the narrator do not seem able, or willing, to remember it. The dizzying questions in Paul Berlin’s mind—“What part was fact and what part was the extension of fact? And how were facts separated from possibilities? What had really happened and what merely might have happened? How did it end?”—speak for the character’s desperate need both to recover the blank spots of his traumatic memories and to re-cover them by substitution with hypothetical scenarios (O’Brien 27). To Paul Berlin, pretending seems to imply, first, imagining contingencies, and second, paradoxically, refusing to dream, as if the latter involved a dangerous and irresponsible flight from reality.

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By blurring the lines between memory, imagination, and fiction, the narrative follows the basic tenets of magical realism; significantly, almost every dream sequence has a direct correlative in one of Paul Berlin’s memories. For example, when during its pursuit of Cacciato, the squad falls into a hole in the ground, and ends up in a Vietcong tunnel, the episode calls to mind the circumstances of Frenchie Tucker’s and Bernie Lynn’s deaths, who were ordered to search a tunnel before destroying it, by following a senseless SOP (standard operating procedure). According to the squad’s raisonneur, Doc Peret, the cycle of “what you remember is determined by what you see, and what you see depends on what you remember” needs to be broken by focusing on the order of things, by sorting out the flow of events, and by searching “for that point at which what happened had been extended into a vision of what might have happened” (206). In an environment beyond one’s control, such as war, imagination becomes a tool for controlling things, “a way of working out the possibilities” (226). The extreme nature of the events that characterize a war chronotope can easily blur the lines between dream and reality. However, at Piraeus, when the squad’s desertion (or pursuit of Cacciato, depending on one’s point of view) is about to come to an end, Paul Berlin manages to dream their way around an imminent obstacle (customs agents); and yet, he realizes that he is awake and fully sane, and not dreaming (272). In Paris, the reality check works again; Paul Berlin perceives the wind as real, and licks the rain from his lips, “wet and real” (291). If he can imagine Paris, then it is real. The dream is about to end when the squad ambushes Cacciato in a hotel room yet again, but in fact it rejoins reality in the same inconclusive manner that it started. Neither Paul Berlin nor the reader will ever know what happened to Cacciato. In case he had been killed or captured (a plausible situation), the event would have generated such a traumatic blow that Paul Berlin might have blocked the slightest memory of it. The only other traumatizing event that Paul Berlin avoids describing is Lieutenant Sidney Martin’s fragging by his own squad. The overall suggestion in O’Brien’s works is that, in any war, death becomes its own purpose; in Going after Cacciato, Lieutenant Sidney

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Martin is fascinated by it. What seems to appeal to him is “the chance to confront death many times,” a possible sign of repetition compulsion, the type of behavioral disorder that Freud attributes to traumatic neuroses. Martin believes in war as “a means of confronting ending itself, many repeated endings” (166), and yet, his own “ending” can never be mentioned because it can be neither real nor imaginable; fratricide is too horrendous an act to understand and to remember. In the moral fog of war, good and evil are difficult to tell apart, and O’Brien does not take sides in the conundrum, considering the lack of order, purpose, and meaning in Paul Berlin’s memories. When yet again the character remembers the dead, “everyone so incredibly goddamned young,” he seems to recoil from his own imagination, and “[slips] back to his observation tower along the South China Sea,” apparently straddling two worlds, “partly here, partly there,” “[h]ard to tell which is real,” and concludes that it is “neither real nor unreal, it [is] simply there” (200). The elusive deictic “there” incorporates an unrecoverable past, an unbearable present, and a hypothetical future—all in one. Tortured by a past devoid of facts and order, and lost in a chaotic present marred by the randomness of death, Paul Berlin uses “his imagination as a kind of tool to shape the future. Not exactly daydreams, not exactly fantasies. Just a way of working out the possibilities. Controlling things, directing things” (226). The need for control is apparently something new to him because his recollection of the time when he was drafted indicates the personality of a drifter, a sleepwalker out of touch with reality: “[Being drafted] came as no great shock. Even then the war wasn’t real. He let himself be herded through basic training, then AIT, and all the while there was no sense of reality— another daydream, a weird pretending. He was too young” (227). In a politicized undertone, the internalized narrator suggests that Paul Berlin, along with his entire generation, were driven to slaughter like cattle (“herded”), unaware of their fate, unquestioning and obedient, entrapped in and by the system. Entrapment, the feeling of irrevocably losing control over one’s fate, of surrendering one’s will to invisible forces, is a significant concept in the novel. “A sense of entrapment mixed with mystery” (250) is also

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the sense that Paul Berlin experiences in Quang Ngai, the kind of farm country that he has known well since childhood, now familiar but at the same time threatening, first of all because of the hedges behind which villages would hide: Guarding, but mostly concealing, the hedgerows in Quang Ngai sometimes seemed like a kind of smoked glass forever hiding whatever it was that was not meant to be seen. Like curtains, or like walls. Like camouflage. So where the paddies represented ripeness and age and depth, the hedgerows expressed the land’s secret qualities: cut up, twisting, covert, chopped and mangled, blind corners leading to dead ends, short horizons always changing. It was only a feeling. A feeling of marching through a great maze. (252)

The combination of beauty, mystery, and danger that underlies the description of a Vietnamese rural landscape may easily induce a feeling similar to Carpentier’s marvelous real, which arises from a “privileged revelation of reality, […] or an amplification of the scale and categories of reality, perceived with particular intensity by virtue of an exaltation of the spirit that leads it to a kind of extreme state [estado límite]” (“Marvelous Real” 86). The sense of “entrapment mixed with mystery,” experienced by O’Brien’s character, echoes quite closely—if unintentionally on the author’s part—Carpentier’s “extreme state” of the spirit. If Carpentier’s magical realism (a concept that the Latin-American writer and critic isolates, in fact, as referencing only European art) is ontological, meaning that “its source [lies in] material beliefs or practices from the cultural context in which the text is set,” O’Brien’s magical realist writing (a style from which the author theoretically distances himself) is epistemological, meaning that it “takes its inspiration for its magical realist elements from sources which do not necessarily coincide with the cultural context of the fiction, or for that matter, of the writer” (Roberto González as cited by Bowers 91). The feeling that the elusive reality of Quang Ngai elicits in Paul Berlin’s mind does not seem any less magical than the impression that a South American landscape left in Carpentier’s. The amplified categories of reality that lead to O’Brien’s character’s extreme state of spirit remain, however, limited to a particular war

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chronotope—Vietnam, or more specifically, the American experience of it. Paul Berlin’s odyssey to Paris, which incorporates the trauma of Vietnam, is not a “madman’s fantasy.” Working out the possibilities in an observation tower by the South China Sea, Paul Berlin is “awake and fully sane.” The composite reality that he inhabits does not feel like just a daydream or a figment of his imagination, as he repeatedly checks on the veracity of this fact: “He touche[s] his left wrist. The pulse [is] firm. His brain tingle[s], his vision [is] twenty-twenty. Nothing nutty, nothing unusual. Leaning against the wall of sandbags, his back to the South China Sea, he [is] in full command of his faculties” (O’Brien 272). Nothing can be more terrifying than the magic experienced in a state of wakefulness, or conversely, the hyperawareness of a reality that resists authentication by both the senses and the mind. Paul Berlin fails to recover the experience of Vietnam because each time that he comes closer to ordering the facts and framing the ineffable, he compulsively re-covers the traces leading back to his initial traumatization. O’Brien might find himself in a more privileged position than his character’s because, as a soldier-author, he has at least managed to acquire an empathetic audience and to expand the theme of his novel into a larger truth than the immediate anti-war message. The “war of the living” is O’Brien’s concept designating society’s ongoing war with issues of conscience: “We are at war with our own despair […]. The bombs can be words. The bullets can be misdeeds. We’re all at war, all of us, all the time. For me the use of Vietnam and war in general is a way of getting at what all of us face all of the time, every moment of life” (Herzog, Writing Vietnam 117). Considering O’Brien’s post-Vietnam social engagement and Grass’s post-World War II political activism, one may find that the artistic chronotope of war can function as a paradigm for peace, truth, and moral justice—at the price of confronting ending itself, many repeated endings. ***

CONCLUSION

THE MISSING LINK TRAUMA, IMAGINATION, AND MAGIC

If there is a nexus between trauma, imagination, and magic, it comes about fleetingly in both the creative process and the reading experience, in the author’s and the reader’s minds. Trauma usually triggers the chain reaction that runs from a psychological condition, through a psychic function, to an artistic image. Consequently, the term “traumatic imagination,” which in itself already conflates a psychological condition (trauma) and its putative artistic remedy (imagination), constitutes a critical category that I find indispensable in the analysis of literary texts struggling to represent limit events from different historical periods and a variety of geo-cultural locations, that is, from extreme time-spaces or shock chronotopes. The process and the artistic medium by which the traumatic imagination realizes the fictional image has been known, for more than half a century now, as magical realism. Through magical realist writing, the traumatic imagination transfers to narrative memory events that have been precluded from narrativization by trauma. This postmodernist writing mode does not copy reality (in the tradition of

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mimetic representation) but reconstructs it by reshuffling all of its familiar elements. The magic in magical realism—flagrantly unreal images produced by the imagination—can help integrate events from seemingly impossible (originally unimaginable) experiences into more or less coherent realities within the literary text. Magic is the indispensable element by which the traumatic imagination rearranges and re-presents reality when mimetic reality-testing hits the wall of an unassimilated, and inassimilable, event. The memory of an extremely violent event can neither be shaped nor kept alive outside of a narrative. Linking past and present, memory can preserve a subject’s identity only by means of narratives: one may even say that our lives are in fact the stories that we either tell or hear about. Antoinette, Rhys’s main character in Wide Sargasso Sea, Melquíades, García Márquez’s invisible narrator in One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Saleem, Rushdie’s self-proclaimed creator of history in Midnight’s Children, all identify themselves with their stories; and whenever their stories fail, the characters quite literally disintegrate with them. Narrative memory does not store facts of past experiences but creates meaning, an indispensable, congruous sense of what happened. Traumatic memory, on the other hand, may preclude the construction of a narrative by prompting the subject to revise the part that he or she has played in the event ad infinitum, to search for a belated and impossible adaptation. By virtue of its dissociation from consciousness, traumatic memory usually compels trauma victims to revisit the violent event for as long as their control over it is unsatisfactory and until the traumatic memory can be turned into narrative memory. Those affected by trauma, either directly or vicariously, often create stories permeated with imaginary elements and symbols, which render their accounts problematic especially if one expects the “historical truth” to surge from realistic details and factual accuracy. Particularly when it comes to actual shock chronotopes, there is no such thing as ordinary memory, an automatic and complete integration of information in the psyche, but only traumatic memory, which eventually may or may not be transformed into narrative memory. The memory of an event is

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always a constructed image pertaining more to the feeling of the experience rather than to its factual content. Vicarious experiences can possibly be ended by the subject (author or reader) at any time, whenever they become too painful, which, on the other hand, is only rarely true of their psychological impact. It is this dual ontological makeup of fiction that validates the traumatic imagination as a consciousness of survival. Even if an author (usually not even a secondary witness of an extreme event) or readers (usually limited to tertiary witnessing) may live or re-live the anxiety, the pain, the suffering, or even the agony of death inflicted by violent events, the traumatic imagination, however painful in itself, will always allow them to keep (or create) a safe distance that can guarantee at least a temporary avoidance of psychic wounding. The traumatic imagination has the ability to make death, “the unthinkable,” available to consciousness in the first place, by re-creating or simulating it in fiction. Skibell’s walking dead, for instance, make death look (literally) like a walk in the countryside or a stay at a luxurious hotel; although they know that they could not possibly have survived their executions, they still pretend to be alive and well–until they are executed for a second time. Similarly, Condé’s character Tituba narrates her story by talking to readers from the realm of the dead: it is only in the last pages of the novel that readers finally learn that they have been listening to a ghost’s voice. The relationship between trauma, the physical or psychological pain that has caused it, and imagination reveals an extraordinary complexity: unlike the products of imagination, pain can hardly be expressed in language. Consequently, if we can assume that imagination can compensate for the objectlessness of pain, it follows that magical realism succeeds in simulating pain because it can turn it into images, that is, perceivable objects, which language can capture and convey more effectively. The traumatic imagination thus translates an unspeakable state (pain) into a readable image: it is the process by which shock chronotopes become artistic chronotopes. The scenes of massacres in the works of Carpentier, García Márquez, and Rushdie, the executions in Condé and Skibell, or the horrifying prison abuses in Malamud all reveal the power of

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the realistic detail when imbued with the understated suggestiveness of the magical realist language. The traumatic imagination uses the artistic suggestiveness of magical realism in order to turn what resists representation (trauma) into an accessible reality. An inaccessible reality, on the other hand, such as one contaminated or erased by severe trauma, can lead more often than not to psychic numbing, which in its turn might account for the usually emotionless tone of magical realist writing. Whenever an extraordinary event happens, there is no questioning of its reason for happening; narrator and characters act as if nothing in the world (their world) could faze them. Flying carpets, a levitating priest, or a beautiful woman ascending to heaven go apparently hardly noticed by the characters in García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, just as metamorphosing human beings seem “natural” to the characters of Carpentier and Rushdie. Therefore, I believe that magical realism has the ability not only to evoke emotions by re-creating them through imagination, but also to silence them—in quite the same way trauma would. Magical realism re-presents the unpresentable by simulation; however, even if its simulacra might resemble the lack of emotions (psychic numbing) usually induced by trauma, at the same time they acknowledge the otherwise unacknowledgeable existence of trauma. On the one hand, magical realism attempts to bear witness to the unexplainable, to histories which have marred human consciousness and raised questions about our identity and overall psychological makeup; on the other hand, magical realism introduces the language of trauma, as a mode of expression of the traumatic imagination, in order to create a hyperreality—such as García Márquez’s Macondo, Condé’s “historical” Salem, Rhys’s village of Massacre, Skibell’s hotel Amfortas, or O’Brien’s road to Paris—which may be felt as if it were experienced for the first time, at or around the initial traumatic moment(s). The difference between bearing witness and vicarious traumatization depends on the subject’s closeness to trauma. If the latter is a form of empathy that may “lead to the overidentification of vicarious trauma, witnessing has to do with an art work producing a deliberate ethical consciousness…”

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(Kaplan 122). In the final analysis, none of the works discussed here can be viewed only as an artistic re-creation of a shock chronotope or another, but more significantly, as an act of working through trauma and as an indictment of violence and injustice. Magical realism is not the magic bullet of trauma therapy, but rather a way of acknowledging the trauma induced by a violent loss or an unbearable absence, and of learning how to live with it. Living with trauma incurred by or inherited (transmitted transgenerationally) from different shock chronotopes—such as slavery, colonialism, the Holocaust, and war—and with trauma as a cultural phenomenon means, ultimately, engaging the past by telling its stories and by learning how to listen to the other and to oneself. Most of the characters that I have analyzed here, Grass’s Oskar, Skibell’s Chaim, Malamud’s Yakov, Rushdie’s Saleem, García Márquez’s Melquíades, and Condé’s Tituba, are still alive because their authors allowed them to speak, to bear witness to the shock chronotopes of war, the Holocaust, colonialism, and slavery, respectively. Moreover, their stories are still alive because they have been constantly addressed to an audience willing to listen, or, ultimately, to bear witness to trauma. “In bearing witness, […] one not only provides a witness where no one was there to witness before, but more than that, one feels responsible for injustice in general. Witnessing involves wanting to change the kind of world where injustice, of whatever kind, is common” (Kaplan 122). As an act of telling, magical realist writing may work as a means of both recovering and re-covering individual and historical traumata by following, however, the same goals: first, to acknowledge its devastating effects and to learn how to live with them; and second, to move on, with a moral lesson learned, toward a future that would preclude the repetition of horror. Juxtaposing shock chronotopes or comparing the severity of the traumata that they have caused would lead to what Michael Rothberg calls a politics of competitive memory, against which the theorist has recently argued and proposed, instead, the concept of “multidirectional memory”—an intercultural dynamic produced by the “interaction of different historical memories” (Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory 3).

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The present study, however, has mostly focused on literary analyses of the way in which major shock chronotopes are brought to life in geoculturally quite different, but artistically still similar, fictional texts. While, on occasion, the argument might have sounded excessively inclusive with regard to the effects of vicarious traumatization, it has deliberately circumvented the main pitfall of trauma-theory-based criticism, which, according to Susannah Radstone, is that “it arguably constructs and polices the boundary of what can be recognized as trauma…” Comparing the media attention focused on the post-traumatic effects of 9/11 in the U.S. with the attention to the human tragedy in Rwanda, Radstone raises a couple of pertinent questions, such as, “Who gets claimed by trauma theory, and who ignored [and] which events get labeled ‘trauma’ and which do not?” (24) The answers lie, I believe, in the uneasy realm of postcolonial othering: the intrinsically “innocent” (that is, we at the “civilized” center) are supposedly fundamentally worthier of attention than the always unpredictable and potentially “guilty” (i.e., the Other residing on the margins of “civilization”). An example of the extent of this common bias was an Associated Press headline following the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on March 11th, 2011, which read, “In Disaster-Stricken Japan, Third-World Scenes” (a similar analogy was circulated in reference to images of New Orleans after hurricane Katrina). While the authors of such headlines might not, in fact, be guilty of condescension or ill will, their language is still reflecting an outdated postcolonial worldview. Human suffering and the disruptive effects of trauma are not quantifiable or comparable in any way, but the causes and the conditions that have led to them are—and any such inquiry necessarily has to start with listening to and acknowledging the victims’ stories. Although based on witness interviews and supposedly objective, factual research, the Report of the 9/11 Commission, for instance, owes its inconclusive character to the duality of its narrative. The text lies somewhere between a trauma narrative, that is, a subconscious acting out of the original event, and a post-traumatic account, that is, a conscious attempt at working through trauma and possibly finding closure.

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In Alison Young’s words, “The Report of the 9/11 Commission narrates the event in order to re-live it. Its sincerity derives from the continual repetition of trauma: not the trauma of the attacks of September 11, but the traumatic realization that security procedures are always already insecure” (245). Young does not find fault with the (undeliberate or unconscious) insincerity of a post-traumatic narrative, but points out, rather, the difficulty of achieving sincerity in the wake of trauma: “… the limit case provided by cultural or legal responses to disaster allows us to acknowledge that such texts [as the 9/11 Report] both are and are not sincere: we have reached the aporia of sincerity, one occasioned by the legacy of trauma” (246). Trauma essentially precludes any factual representation, which makes any post-traumatic narrative fundamentally aporetic but nonetheless true. Whether it is by sensationalist and ratings-driven media, a victim’s memoir, or a fictional trauma narrative, we are constantly surrounded by a trauma narrative or another: the first kind may have a dangerously desensitizing effect caused by repetition ad nauseam and decontextualization (a graphic image of war violence or natural disasters cuts to a toothpaste commercial and minutes later to a car insurance ad); and the last two are normally conducive to serious thought, reflection, and introspection. Unlike watching television or films, reading literature is always bound to elicit both an emotional and a rational response, whose intensity will usually vary according to the reader’s subjectivity and sensitivity, to his or her particular experiences. “Literature’s ability to resonate with readers’ experiences is certainly one factor in its enduring position in the cultural imagination. As Roland Barthes wrote, we rewrite ‘the text of the work within the text of our lives’ ” (Dutro 425). In a world prone to forgetting or re-covering the horrors of its past, and in which bearing witness to atrocity may still become a threat to one’s life, writing and reading (implicitly co-writing a text) come as gestures of defiance, acts of working through trauma, and attempts to come to terms with the past—one’s own and the other’s. ***

ENDNOTES 1. I borrow from Mikhail Bakhtin’s terminology, where “chronotope” designates the time-space that fleshes out the literary text. “Shock” is used in the sense it carried in “shell-shock,” the World War I phrase for what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). 2. In the same work, Freud further develops this point: “[the dreams of patients suffering from traumatic neurosis] are endeavouring to master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety [i.e., the state of preparedness] whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis” (36–37). The idea is based on the distinction he draws earlier between “anxiety” and “fright”: in his view, it is only the latter that could lead to a traumatic neurosis (11). 3. Relying on his psychoanalytical observations, Dori Laub states that “trauma survivors live not with memories of the past, but with an event that could not and did not proceed through to its completion, has no ending, attained no closure, and therefore, as far as its survivors are concerned, continues into the present and is current in every respect” (Testimony 69). 4. One of Jean Baudrillard’s key concepts in Simulacra and Simulation. 5. Freud seemed genuinely puzzled when he finally recognized that repetition compulsion may involve “unpleasurable” experiences: “It is clear that the greater part of what is re-experienced under the compulsion to repeat must cause the ego unpleasure, since it brings to light activities of repressed instinctual impulses. […] But we come now to a new and remarkable fact, namely that the compulsion to repeat also recalls from the past experiences which include no possibility of pleasure, and which can never, even long ago, have brought satisfaction even to instinctual impulses which have since been repressed” (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle 21). 6. Viewed from this perspective, claiming one’s own survival might ultimately be a part of a history of trauma: “Repetition is not simply the attempt to grasp that one has almost died but, more fundamentally and enigmatically, the very attempt to claim one’s own survival. If history is to be understood as the history of a trauma, it is a history that is experienced as the endless attempt to assume one’s survival as one’s own” (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience 64). 7. Hardly any of humanity’s historical experiences can be viewed as completely devoid of trauma—which might explain cultural behavior and a

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certain obsession with trauma: “From one point of view, every generation’s experience is potentially traumatic because no era wholly avoids misfortune, battered idealism, and reminders of death. When has urban decay in America not been appalling? Why should trauma be a hot topic now? And if everyone is traumatized, does the concept have any useful meaning at all? Or is it culturally significant but clinically as superficial as the starspangled plastic bandages parents put on a child’s sore finger? And if berserk violence in life and onscreen represents one sure method of settling scores and relieving the stress of an excruciatingly competitive society, can trauma exercise a sinister attraction? Post-traumatic stress does help explain some cultural behavior, and the mood sketched above does reflect a collective experience of historical shock” (Farrell 5). According to Selma Leydesdorff and others, “It may not be possible for trauma ever to be fully overcome. Moreover recent research suggests that trauma is contagious, transmissible from survivors to their listeners and witnesses; and, both within families and by means of wider, collective processes, to subsequent generations. Studies of the children of Shoah survivors, for example, have demonstrated how distortions in the mental life and life styles of the parents may have profound and confusing effects on some of their offspring, especially when a particular child appears to carry the burden of representing the aspirations of murdered ancestors” (Leydesdorff et al. 17). LaCapra distinguishes the virtual experience of vicarious traumatization from the act of appropriating the victim’s voice as one’s own: “It is dubious to identify with the victim to the point of making oneself a surrogate victim who has a right to the victim’s voice or subject position. The role of empathy and empathic unsettlement in the attentive secondary witness does not entail this identity; it involves a kind of virtual experience through which one puts oneself in the other’s position while recognizing the difference of that position and hence not taking the other’s place” (LaCapra 78). Empathy may only come about when one starts acknowledging the presence of trauma and develops a disposition of listening to the other: “While reading literature cannot take the place of the work of mourning imposed by history, reading the ‘art of trauma’ may engage the reader in a dialogue with that trauma which might open him or her up to begin to acknowledge its hitherto repressed presence. Thus literature may help the reader to bracket formative identifications, and generate a willingness to listen to the other” (Boheemen-Saaf 10–11). The resistance to recognize and deal with the traumata caused by Communism might also account for the slow pace of the political and social

Endnotes

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reforms in some countries of the former Soviet-bloc in the 1990s. “Coming to terms with the communist past involves confronting a trauma that is both collective and, for individuals who suffered directly, deeply personal. Many of them had not previously been publicly recognized as victims. Speaking out—telling one’s own story about the traumatic past is both a personal necessity, and inescapably social in its significance” (Leydesdorff et al. 11). Kalí Tal acknowledges the relevance of non-traumatized authors when she writes, “Literature of trauma holds at its center the reconstruction and recuperation of the traumatic experience, but it is also actively engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the writings and representations of nontraumatized authors” (Tal 17). Bakhtin refers to this reification of time and events as follows: “We cannot help but be strongly impressed by the representational importance of the chronotope. Time becomes, in effect, palpable and visible; the chronotope makes narrative events concrete, makes them take on flesh, causes blood to flow in their veins” (Bakhtin 250). Bakhtin recognizes the presence of chronotopes at every level of the literary text—image, language, and word: “Any and every literary image is chronotopic. Language, as a treasure-house of images, is fundamentally chronotopic. Also chronotopic is the internal form of a word, that is, the mediating marker with whose help the root meanings of spatial categories are carried over into temporal relationships (in the broadest sense)” (Bakhtin 251). According to Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, “To speak of chronotopic conventions seems to be a more useful way to distinguish genres of memory than any strict contrast between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy.’ Just as there have been successive and alternative forms of narrative realism in the novel, so there are in narrative memory. These conventions constrain the narrative products, influencing what kinds of actors and events are likely to be the focus of attention and how they are described and connected” (Antze and Lambek xviii). The temporal angle of the mediation becomes particularly important when the past is narrativized by using present conventions as points of reference: “What symbolic mediation suggests is that any account of the past is organized by means of certain cultural conventions” (Lambek 246). The ambivalence of our relationships with our own stories accounts for the importance of telling, as an act of memory, and of our search for meaning: “People emerge from and as the products of their stories about themselves

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as much as their stories emerge from their lives. Through acts of memory they strive to render their lives in meaningful terms. This entails connecting the parts into a more or less unified narrative in which they identify with various narrative types—hero, survivor, victim, guilty perpetrator, etc.” (Antze and Lambek xviii). Tal elaborates on the importance of context (everyday vs. traumatic experiences) in investing common words with different meanings: “Traumatic experience catalyzes a transformation of meaning in the signs individuals use to represent their experiences. Words such as blood, terror, agony, and madness gain new meaning, within the context of trauma, and survivors emerge from the traumatic environment with a new set of definitions. On the surface, language appears unchanged—survivors still use the word terror, non-traumatized audiences read and understand the word terror, and the dislocation of meaning is invisible until one pays attention to the cry of the survivors, ‘What can we do to share our visions? Our words can only evoke the incomprehensible’ ” (Tal 16). The inner drive to rationalize trauma might also involve a counter-drive to continue keeping it hidden: “Massive trauma subverts existing systems of symbolization and tends to bring about in its victims a hunger for explanation or formulation, though it also stimulates (perhaps more frequently) an opposite tendency toward a covering over that requires static closure” (Lifton 165). The reader will note that I am deliberately avoiding the word “surreality” because of its affiliation to surrealism and the avant-garde movement of the early twentieth century. Although some magical realist imagery may have a dreamlike quality, I would like to emphasize the writing mode’s rootedness in reality. LaCapra and I are guilty of oversimplification here: author and narrator (even a first-person narrator) are evidently two distinct identities. Therefore, let us assume for the sake of clarity that a “narrator” is also an “implied author,” and that both share the same voice. What a traumatic event makes us feel, according to Blanchot, is “that there cannot be any experience of the disaster, even if we were to understand disaster to be the ultimate experience. This is one of its features: it impoverishes all experience, withdraws from experience all authenticity” (Blanchot 50–51). As Shoshana Felman eloquently explains, “To seek reality is both to set out to explore the injury inflicted by it—to turn back on, and to try to penetrate, the state of being stricken, wounded by reality [Wirklichkeitswund]—and to

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attempt, at the same time, to re-emerge from the paralysis of this state, to engage reality [Wirklichkeit suchend] as an advent, a movement, and as a vital, critical necessity of moving on” (Felman 24). Orly Lubin sees in the contagiousness of trauma a perpetual reenactment of its violence: “At the same time as it represents its speaker’s experience with violence, [testimony] enacts violence against its listeners. It forces the knowledge of trauma upon them, which traumatizes them as well. In this way, it doubles with every telling; it is at once the story of an individual and a contribution to a memory that is collective” (Lubin 137). Connectedness to the other requires an empathic kind of listening or reading, through which the audience may feel the pain of the traumatized consciousness telling the story: “If through listening or reading, readers find only approximations of the damaged consciousness that makes itself felt in art and writing, the words and images may nonetheless compel us to listen and respond. Recounting the extreme sometimes has the power to form a community entangled together through the act of listening” (Miller and Tougaw 19). Kelly Oliver elaborates on the double meaning of witnessing and its role in (re)creating subjectivity as follows: “It is important to note that witnessing has both the juridical connotations of seeing with one’s own eyes and the religious connotations of testifying to that which cannot be seen, in other words, bearing witness. It is this double meaning that makes witnessing such a powerful alternative to recognition in reconceiving subjectivity and therefore ethical relations. — The double meaning of witnessing— eyewitness testimony based on first-hand knowledge, on the one hand, and bearing witness to something beyond recognition that can’t be seen, on the other—is the heart of subjectivity. The tension between eyewitness testimony and bearing witness both positions the subject in finite history and necessitates the infinite response-ability of subjectivity” (Oliver 16). In order to make their voices heard, victims must often wage an uphill battle against a society unwilling to listen: “The process of witnessing requires space within the symbolic order of a culture, a ‘listening space’ that is not granted automatically, but very often has to be won through struggle. Telling a story of trauma, then, frequently depends upon a politics of memory to force the issue into the public domain” (Leydesdorff et al. 10). Žižek interprets Lacan’s concept of the Real as a kind of black hole amidst the symbolic, characterized primarily by the impossibility of its inscription: “Lacan’s whole point is that the Real is nothing but this impossibility of its inscription: the Real is not a transcendent positive entity, persisting

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33. 34.

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somewhere beyond the symbolic order like a hard kernel inaccessible to it, some kind of Kantian ‘Thing-in-itself’—in itself it is nothing at all, just a void, an emptiness in a symbolic structure marking some central impossibility” (Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology 172–173). Foster tries to strike a balance between the two controversial effects of trauma—the subjectivity forming and the subjectivity annihilating one: “In trauma discourse, the subject is evacuated and elevated at once. And in this way trauma discourse magically resolves two contradictory imperatives in culture today: deconstructive analyses and identity politics. This strange rebirth of the author, this paradoxical condition of absentee authority, is a significant turn in contemporary art, criticism, and cultural politics. Here the return of the real converges with the return of the referential” (Foster 168). In fact, Janet’s work was rediscovered almost one century later: “[Janet’s] monumental legacy was crowded out by psychoanalysis, and largely forgotten, until Henri Ellenberger (1970) rescued him from total obscurity in The Discovery of the Unconscious” (van der Kolk and van der Hart 159). According to Janet, “In contrast to narrative memory, which is a social act, traumatic memory is inflexible and invariable. Traumatic memory has no social component; it is not addressed to anybody, the patient does not respond to anybody; it is a solitary activity. In contrast, ordinary memory fundamentally serves a social function…” (van der Kolk and van der Hart 163). Janet describes traumatic memories as the “unassimilated scraps of overwhelming experiences, which need to be integrated with existing mental schemes, and be transformed into narrative language. It appears that, in order for this to occur successfully, the traumatized person has to return to the memory often in order to complete it” (van der Kolk and van der Hart 176). Ellul’s use of the term “image” is strictly restricted to what we perceive by sight, as different from verbal and mental images. The original title of Ellul’s work is La Parole humiliée (1981), which shows that the author considers the spoken word as the primary victim of the image. Ellul emphasizes the drug-like effect of the thrills offered by the world of images, where the absence of truth unavoidably comes to erase true reality: “Above all, I must not become aware of reality, so images create a substitute reality. The word obliges me to consider reality from the point of view of truth. Artificial images, passing themselves off for truth, obliterate and erase the reality of my life and my society. They allow me to enter an

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image-filled reality that is much more thrilling. Even television news, when it deals with catastrophes, disasters, and crises, takes the drama out of them by making them extraordinary and thrilling—by literally converting them into something metaphysical. The more terrible the spectacle, the calmer the hypnosis of the images makes me” (Ellul 128). For the sake of clarity, Baudrillard does not use “real” and “reality” in their Lacanian sense, which I, on the other hand, borrow and use throughout my argument. In an era dominated by an excess of information, the (over) production of meaning can only lead to a loss of authentic signification. According to Baudrillard, “Rather than creating communication, [information] exhausts itself in the act of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning. A gigantic process of simulation that is very familiar” (Simulacra and Simulation 80). According to Baudrillard, “Ideology only corresponds to a corruption of reality through signs; simulation corresponds to a short circuit of reality and to its duplication through signs. It is always the goal of the ideological analysis to restore the objective process, it is always a false problem to wish to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum” (Simulacra and Simulation 27). Significant in this context are Robert Jay Lifton’s observations from the late 1970s: “We live on images. As human beings we know our bodies and our minds only through what we can imagine. To grasp our humanity we need to structure these images into metaphors and models. Writers, artists, and visionaries have always known this—as have philosophers and scientists in other ways” (The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life 3). As already mentioned, Baudrillard’s language may sometimes get obscured by allegory and hyperbole; however, his critique of modern-day society in The Vital Illusion is as acerbic as ever: “We move into a world where everything that exists only as idea, dream, fantasy, utopia will be eradicated, because it will immediately be realized, operationalized. Nothing will survive as an idea or a concept. You will not even have time enough to imagine. Events, real events, will not even have time to take place. Everything will be preceded by its virtual realization. We are dealing with an attempt to construct an entirely positive world, a perfect world, expurgated of every illusion, of every sort of evil and negativity, exempt from death itself. This pure, absolute reality, this unconditional realization of the world—this is what I call the Perfect Crime” (66–67). In Tarrying with the Negative, Žižek draws on Kant’s “ ‘transcendental Ideas,’ whose status is merely regulative and not constitutive: Ideas do not

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simply add themselves to reality, they literally supplement it; our knowledge of objective reality can be made consistent and meaningful only by way of reference to Ideas. In short, Ideas are indispensable to the effective functioning of our reason; they are ‘a natural and inevitable illusion’: the illusion that Ideas refer to existing things beyond possible experience is ‘inseparable from human reason’ ” (Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative 88). In Hassan’s “language of silence” I recognize the medium of expression of the “traumatic imagination,” particularly when Hassan describes silence in The Dismemberment of Orpheus: “The negative informs silence; and silence is my metaphor of a language that expresses, with harsh and subtle cadences, the stress in art, culture, and consciousness. The crisis is modern and postmodern, current and continuous, though discontinuity and apocalypse are also images of it. Thus the language of silence conjoins the need both of autodestruction and self-transcendence” (Hassan 12). I must point out that, even though McHale uses “illusion” in a less utopian (and passionate) manner than Baudrillard did, I still find his term quite similar to the philosopher’s “vital illusion.” Postmodernist illusion is a paradoxical state of wakefulness within the reality of the dream: “This is the difference between experiencing fiction as a dream unfolding in the mind, and experiencing it as the moment of wakening from the dream into reality, or the moment of slipping from reality into dream; or the experience of being aware that you are dreaming in the midst of the dream itself, while you are dreaming it” (McHale 221). By virtue of the parallax view, I would like to remind the reader of an image of similar ontological boundaries in the last lines of John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”—possibly an early harbinger of postmodernism. In Roland Barthes’s theory, the reader is the hub of all textual signification. As an impersonal “destination” of the text, the reader unifies all its inscriptions: “[A] text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted” (Barthes 150). In a larger cultural context, a variation of Barthes’s reader/scriptor concept is also present in Lyotard: “In a sense, the people are only that which

Endnotes

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actualizes the narratives: they do this not only by recounting them, but also by listening to them and recounting themselves through them; in other words, by putting them into ‘play’ in their institutions—thus by assigning themselves the posts of narratee and diegesis as well as the post of narrator” (Lyotard 23). In Other Worlds: The Fantasy Genre, John H. Timmerman suggests that fantasy, besides reconstructing our own reality, also creates a “parallel reality,” a kind of safe haven where the modern individual can find the muchneeded break from the surrounding general rat race: “[Fantasy literature] does more than simply restructure a reality which we already know—it also offers a parallel reality which gives us a renewed awareness of what we already know. There is an enormous and unquenchable thirst in humankind for precisely this opportunity for pause. And, as the pace of modern life inexorably quickens, the fascination for fantasy literature quickens simultaneously” (1). Jackson also speaks out against any acceptance of fantasy as a transcendental reality: “Fantasy is not to do with inventing another non-human world: it is not transcendental. It has to do with inverting elements of this world, re-combining its constitutive features in new relations to produce something strange, unfamiliar and apparently ‘new,’ absolutely ‘other’ and different” (Jackson 8). Olsen and I draw on Tzvetan Todorov’s theory of the fantastic, to which I return later in the chapter: “Fantasy is that stutter between two modes of discourse which generates textual instability, and ellipse of uncertainty. The stutter may last for a phrase, for a sentence, for a chapter, even for a novel, but its result is the banging together of the here and there so that neither the reader nor the protagonist knows quite where he is. That is, fantasy is a deconstructive mode of narrative” (Olsen 19). In his analysis of feelings associated with fantasy, Kreitman also points to the arbitrary reality of the objects of fantasy and their emotional charge: “As a species of imagination, fantasy, like memory, concerns with that which is non-occurrent but differs from memory in that it operates with intentional objects which are not believed to bear a point-to-point correspondence with mundane reality, and which are frequently, perhaps always, emotionally charged” (“Fantasy and Feelings” 3). I am quoting the French original to spare readers possible losses of meaning in my translation: “La fiction fantastique fabrique ainsi un autre monde avec des mots, des pensées et des réalités qui sont de ce monde. Ce nouvel univers élaboré dans la trame du récit se lit entre les lignes et entre les

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termes, dans le jeu des images et des croyances, de la logique et des affects, contradictoires et communément reçus” (Bessière 11–12). In the French original, “[L]e sens du terme fantastique est purement négatif: il désigne tout ce qui, d’une manière ou d’une autre, s’éloigne de la reproduction photographique du réel, c’est-à-dire toute fantaisie, toute stylisation et, il va de soi, l’imaginaire dans son ensemble ” (Caillois 22). In Irène Bessière’s words, “On dit le fantastique pour désigner des oeuvres et des récits spécifiques. Anthropologues et philosophes usent du terme la fantastique pour qualifier la catégorie de l’imagination, entendue non pas comme le pouvoir de produire des simulacres du réel, mais celui d’élaborer des images qui, apparentées au réel, le réorganise suivant des lois propres à la psyché humaine, définie comme la rencontre de croyances, d’affects et de la rationalité. Le fantastique n’est qu’une des démarches de l’imagination” (Bessière 30–31). Not surprisingly, two and a half decades later, Brian McHale will point out the shortcomings of Todorov’s epistemological approach, based on the reader’s responses to supernatural phenomena, and propose instead an ontological one, based on the textual confrontation between the natural and the supernatural. However, Todorov’s influence on the following generations of theorists remains undeniable. Bessière’s original text reads as follows: “Tout thème d’un récit fantastique doit s’accorder au dessein de présenter l’illusoire de manière convaincante sans qu’il soit confondu avec aucune vérité reçue, ni dénoncé comme illusion. II contribue à donner l’apparence de l’existence à ce qui n’a jamais existé. L’auteur du récit fantastique est proche du prestidigitateur, qui montre afin de mieux cacher, qui décrit afin de transcrire l’indicible” (33). “Parce qu’il est le récit des contraires, le fantastique est celui de la limite, particulièrement apte à évoquer les traits extrêmes du réel. Comme l’avait suggéré Sade, il corrige l’impuissance de la littérature à saisir le quotidien” (Bessière 62). “On a constaté que le réalisme magique naît en différents endroits, sans qu’aucune filiation puisse être prouvée—le polygénisme est une notion dont, une fois de plus, le comparatisme ne saurait se passer. Ainsi, il est évident qu’un phénomène aussi courant que l’opposition au réalisme traditionnel aura, selon toute vraisemblance, amené les écrivains de divers pays à proposer des formules analogues ou apparentées, relevant, sans qu’on le sût parfois, du réalisme magique” (Weisgerber, “Bilan provisoire” 215). Scholes explains our reliance on fiction by the fact that we can control it as a medium: “We rely on maps and mirrors precisely because we know their

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limitations and know how to allow for them. But fiction functions as both map and mirror at the same time. Its images are fixed, as the configurations of a map are fixed, and perpetually various, like the features reflected by a mirror, which never gives the same image to the same person” (Scholes 14). Parkinson Zamora emphasizes the paradoxical manner in which “contemporary magical realists write against the illusionism of narrative realism by heightening their own narrative investment in illusion. They undermine the credibility of narrative realism by flaunting the relative incredibility of their own texts. In short, they point to the literary devices by which ‘realistic’ literary worlds are constructed and constrained, and they dramatize by counterrealistic narrative strategies the ways in which those literary worlds (and their inhabitants) may be liberated” (500–501). “Le réalisme magique, de nature métonymique, révélerait une relation nécessaire de contiguïté ou de correspondance entre le réel quotidien et l’imaginaire, tandis que le surréalisme soulignerait, comme la métaphore, l’analogie entre ces termes jusqu’à vouloir en opérer la fusion […]; le réalisme magique ne largue pas les amarres qui l’attachent au quotidien, au delà duquel, précisément, devrait se situer la surréalité” (Weisgerber, “Bilan provisoire” 217). “Là où le surréalisme unit les pôles du quotidien et de l’imaginaire, et le fantastique met en demeure de choisir l’un des contraires, le réalisme magique continue à en poser simplement la simultanéité, sans requérir de solution. Pour ce faire, il faut naturellement que l’imaginaire ne vienne pas s’installer de l’extérieur dans la réalité narrée, en d’autres termes qu’il lui soit immanent, ce qui exclut de toute façon le merveilleux et le fantastique traditionnels. Une fois intériorisés, par contre, aucun obstacle ne les empêche de se mêler au réalisme magique” (Weisgerber, “Bilan provisoire” 218). Just as the ritual of pageantry, the split ontology of the magical realist text is more than just a flashy show. As Parkinson Zamora and Faris also point out, “In magical realist texts, ontological disruption serves the purpose of political and cultural disruption: magic is often given as a cultural corrective, requiring readers to scrutinize accepted realistic conventions of causality, materiality, motivation” (Parkinson Zamora and Faris 3). Baudrillard’s sarcasm is once again directed at the passivity of the human subject that basks in the illusion of the real while manipulated by the media: “The imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false, it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp. Whence the debility of this imaginary, its infantile degeneration. This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults

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are elsewhere, in the ‘real’ world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere—that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness” (Simulacra and Simulation 13). I re-borrow the term proposed by Brian McHale, who acknowledges its coinage by Itamar Even-Zohar: “… Repertoires [of real-world objects, individuals, and properties] are not, of course, made up of real-world thingsin-themselves, things in the raw so to speak, but things as signifieds in a system of signification. We could call these semioticized things ‘realemes,’ using a neologism coined by Itamar Even-Zohar” (86). I use “translation” in the sense defined by physics: “Motion of a body in which every point of the body moves parallel to and the same distance as every other point of the body” (The American Heritage Dictionary). In Carpentier’s case, the chronotope of slavery is moved (translated), without any changes in relation to itself, over more than two centuries as an artistic chronotope. Cf. Chapter 1: In Post-traumatic Culture (1998), Kirby Farrell asserts that, “As an interpretation of the past, trauma is a kind of history. Like other histories, it attempts to square the present with its origins. […] Because not everybody in a given culture is likely to be neurologically afflicted, or affected the same way, trauma is always to some extent a trope” (Farrell 14). According to some accounts, to which Carpentier seems to adhere, “marronage” was a form of slave resistance: maroons were fugitive slaves who established communities in geographically less accessible regions of Hispaniola (but also other Caribbean islands), and who, on different occasions, participated in the slaves’ struggle against the plantation owners. It is important at this point to mention an endnote in Fick’s work which details the atrocities of the Spanish because I believe it reinforces the idea that Caribbean history is, indeed, a history of trauma, of a continual erasure of both physical and cultural identities: “By 1519, only twenty-seven years after Columbus’s arrival, the Indian population of the island known to the Arawaks as Hayti, numbering roughly one million in 1492, had been ruthlessly reduced to a mere one hundred thousand” (Fick 288). The meaning of “absence” here is not to be confused with that of “loss” (even if absence too could be a source of trauma). Unlike “loss,” “absence” designates something that has never been there in the first place but is nonetheless missed and desired. In Dominick LaCapra’s words, “By contrast to absence, loss is situated on a historical level and is the consequence of particular events” (64).

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69. In spite of his reliance on ledgers, letters, journals, drawings, and paintings to “fill in” a hypothetical historical picture, Craton rightly acknowledges the lack of first-hand information from the victims themselves: “It is exciting to resurrect individuals and reconstruct aspects of their lives and family connections from ancient ledgers, and satisfying to learn more about the average fertility, mortality and health patterns of West Indian slaves than anyone previously knew (including the slaves themselves). We can make educated inferences about slaves’ daily lives and relationships from these materials, and even about slaves’ ideas and ideology from their actions. But beyond this, in the virtual absence of any material directly derived from slaves, we must do what we can to fill in the picture with the help (despite their white provenance) of the few realistic paintings and drawings that have survived, such rare journals as the Jamaican, Thomas Thistlewood’s, of planters’, soldiers’ and governors’ letters sent back to Britain, of court cases, or, most poignant of all, of the evidence taken in uncovering slave plots” (Craton xviii–xix). 70. In the following scene, besides the graphic details of the execution itself, the gesture of the white man pushes the horror to limits that only Conrad will be able to portray seven decades later: “The report echoed amongst the cliffs for a second or two, and the negro dropped a bloody corpse across the rope which fastened him to the posts of the gibbet, and prevented his falling to the ground. Another volley was fired at him as he hung upon the rope, throwing the jacket off his face, and scattering his brains around. Several negroes had timidly gathered about the spot, after the military had been marched off, and were looking on the body, when I heard a white man address them. ‘Come here,’ he said, ‘come and put your finger in this hole,’ pointing to a hole which the bullet had made through the skull. ‘You want freedom, do you? This is the sort of freedom we’ll give you, every devil of you! Come here and put your finger where mine is, and see how you like it’ ” (Bleby 32). 71. By Carolyn E. Fick’s account, “While some captives succeeded in throwing themselves into the sea, often with chains still attached, others would knock their heads against the ship or hold their breath until they suffocated; still others would attempt to starve themselves aboard the ships, hoping to die before the end of the voyage. To force recalcitrant slaves to eat, some ship captains would have the slaves’ lips burned by hot charcoal; others would try to make them swallow the coals if they persisted. To set an example, one captain even reportedly went to the extreme of having molten lead poured into the mouths of those who stubbornly refused all food” (Fick 47).

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72. In Children of Cain: Violence and the Violent in Latin America, Tina Rosenberg acknowledges the psychologically numbing and almost surrealistic effect that the visual media had on her perception of Latin American reality: “To the average newspaper reader in the United States, Latin America seems overwhelmingly, numbingly violent, marked by political disappearances, repressive dictatorship, torture, death squads, and revolutions that invariably seem to bring more of the same. Before I went there, the images that I held of Latin America were of sobbing widows; bodies on the roadside; life lived to the music of gunfire. These are the pictures I formed from reading the newspaper when I did not skip the stories on Latin America entirely. The events meant little to me because they had no human context. The names all sounded the same, the events never changed, and the people who acted in them seemed to be irrational monsters” (Rosenberg 11–12). 73. Pécaut points out that even nowadays the “collective memory [of la violencia] has no socially recognized form.” Instead, the official version of the events has actually led to a political manipulation of trauma, meant to exonerate the perpetrators by accusing the victims: “With the agreement of 1958 which officially ended the conflict, installing the Frente Nacional government, a heavy veil was drawn over the preceding events. The most that was officially admitted was that a certain brand of barbarity had flourished. Indeed, the idea of barbarity was employed to acquit the elites of the vital role they played in the violence, instead attributing it almost wholly to the supposed immaturity of the working class and peasantry. […] The working class and the peasantry had provided almost all the victims of fighting, only to find afterwards that they themselves were put in the dock in place of the accused. Their experience was part of a senseless history” (Pécaut 161). 74. The myth-creating process could also be viewed as an effect of the transgenerational character of historical trauma and as an attempt at working through trauma by trivializing and integrating it into an inevitable pattern of “natural disasters”: “The violence of 1946 was an extension of that of 1952–55, which, in turn, was a continuation of the violence of the Thousand Day War (1899–1902), and all this, in turn, perpetuated the violence of nineteenth-century civil wars. La Violencia thus comes to be perceived as a freak occurrence, or a disaster akin to natural disasters. Everything that has affected the victims since that time—migrations, changing work patterns and changing values—is attributed to the violence of that period. In this account, violence has taken on the features of a myth” (Pécaut 161–162).

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75. It is important to include in this discussion Jean-Pierre Durix, who deconstructs magical realism as postcolonial discourse. According to Durix, fiction by postcolonial writers “frequently explores a time when places and people had no name, had not yet emerged into the social sphere. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez refers to a society which is so new that language has not fully accounted for all the universe […]. Its inhabitants’ taking possession of their environment through naming may well appear as a representation of the South American writer’s desire to make his Colombian reality exist by describing it and ordering it in his novel” (124). 76. Michael Reder comments on the relationship between Saleem’s storytelling, his personal past, and India’s history by pointing out their importance in establishing the protagonist’s identity: “Saleem remains active by telling his tale, forging his own identity through his own words. He places this identity within a historical context, relating it not in relation to his family but in relation to the history of India. […] In the process of telling his own personal and family history, Saleem ‘recaptures’ the history of India. Through Saleem, Rushdie offers his commentary not only on the nature of narration and history but also on the importance of forming an individual identity that is defined in relation to one’s historical past” (243–244). 77. Jaina C. Sanga attributes the magical realist mode of the novel to its underlying idea of being “exiled” from reality: “The premise, that one individual can embody the diversity of India, is itself fantastical. This fantastical bent of the novel, its multifarious departures from reality can be read, on one level, as forms of migration. The idea of being exiled from reality is what situates the novel in the mode of ‘magical realism’ ” (Sanga 26–27). 78. According to Gert Buelens and Stef Craps, “Within trauma studies, it has become all but axiomatic that traumatic experiences can only be adequately represented through the use of experimental, (post)modernist textual strategies” (5). 79. A Jewish-Italian survivor of Auschwitz, Levi writes in his last book, The Drowned and the Saved (1986): “We, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. This is an uncomfortable notion of which I have become conscious little by little, reading the memoirs of others and reading mine at a distance of years. We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are […] the

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81.

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submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception” (83–84). Sue Vice embarks on an extensive analysis of readers’ suspicion of postHolocaust authors and their works: “the more personal distance there is between the author and the subject, the more ‘invented’ the work must be. This is clearly a paradox if we are talking about fiction, which is by definition invented; but it is significant that on the whole fewer unsympathetic questions are raised about those with the ‘right’ to fictionalize the subject because of their second-generation or Jewish identity—Cynthia Ozick, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Diane Samuels—than about those who do not own such a right—including David Hartnett and John Hersey” (Vice 4). Grass has always been aware of both the emotional burden and the creative restrictions that his belonging to a guilty generation has placed on him: “Anyone born, like me, in the third decade of [the twentieth] century, cannot deny his share of guilt for the great crime, even if he was very young at the time. […] I find that the threads of my tales are woven together for me in advance, that I am not free in my choice of material: there are too many dead looking over my shoulder while I write” (cited by Preece 1). An uncanny instance of life imitating art is the case of sixteen-year-old Brooke Greenberg of Baltimore, Maryland. In 2009, Brooke was still weighing only thirteen pounds and measuring about twenty-seven inches (reported by Bob Brown for ABC News on June 23, 2009). Unlike the three-foot-tall Oskar, however, Brooke has never uttered a word, and can only communicate by mimicry and sounds characteristic of a six-monthold. To this day, her syndrome remains a medical mystery. Therefore, it is only safe to say that the unexplainable in The Tin Drum lies not so much in Oskar’s physical agelessness as it does in his inherited knowledge of history and in his ability to drum up memories. Grass’s belated confession that the tank division in which he had served in 1945 belonged in fact to the infamous Waffen-SS came after Der Spiegel had broken the story online on August 15, 2006. The battlefield efficiency of the speedy and exceptionally mobile Uhlan units notwithstanding, the myth of any charge against German Panzer divisions has been dispelled by historians. The only victories on record have been won against infantry, not tank units. Almost forty years later, Cacciato’s picture has come to bear an eerie resemblance to the ones taken at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by U.S. military police, showing some of their members posing, giving the two-thumbs-up sign, and smiling next to tortured or dead Iraqi inmates. Similar postures

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captured by U.S. soldiers in battlefield snapshots have surfaced even more recently (Der Spiegel, March 2011). Court-martialled, the soldiers admitted randomly killing innocent Afghan civilians. 86. In her review of The Things They Carried (The New York Times, March 6, 1990), Michiko Kakutani had briefly mentioned O’Brien’s use of the “devices of magical realism,” a suggestion that the author firmly refuted in the interview with Schroeder.

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INDEX Antze, Paul and Michael Lambek, 42, 54, 56–57, 291n15, 292n17 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 5, 11, 40–45, 49–50, 55–56, 120, 197, 201, 225, 246, 248, 289n1, 291n13, n14 Barthes, Roland, 80, 88, 91, 139, 167, 287, 296n44, n45 Baudrillard, Jean, 3, 8, 11, 30, 51, 61, 63–65, 68–69, 73–74, 76, 78, 81, 84, 88, 97, 111, 113, 118, 123, 139, 187, 215, 231, 289n4, 295n36, n37, n38, n40, 296n43, 299n62 Belau, Linda, 32, 86 Benjamin, Walter, 7, 142, 164, 193, 251–252 Bessière, Irène, 89–91, 94, 298n50, 298n52, 298n54, 298n55 Bhabha, Homi, 4, 206, 247 Blanchot, Maurice, 47–48, 52, 292n22 Bowers, Maggie Ann, 7, 279 Caillois, Roger, 90, 298n51 Carpentier, Alejo, 10–13, 19, 100–101, 117, 121–127, 129, 131–132, 135–139, 141, 143, 151–152, 156, 158, 160, 163, 165, 179–180, 183, 279, 283–284, 300n64, 300n66 The Kingdom of This World, 10, 12, 117, 122–125, 128, 131, 133, 140, 183 Caruth, Cathy, 30–33, 36, 147, 289n6

Chanady, Amaryll Beatrice, 100, 102–105, 109 chronotope, 5–6, 10–16, 18–19, 26, 40–44, 48–51, 55–59, 79, 112, 117–123, 125, 129, 131, 136, 139, 144, 149, 151, 160–161, 164, 169–170, 174, 178–180, 190, 197, 200, 208, 220–221, 225–226, 241–244, 259, 264, 267, 277, 280, 285, 289n1, 291n13, n14, 300n64 shock chronotope, 2, 5–6, 9–10, 13–14, 18–19, 25–26, 40–44, 48, 50–51, 57–59, 84–85, 98, 112, 118, 125, 129, 131, 136, 149–151, 161, 169–170, 174, 179–180, 208, 216, 220–221, 225, 242–244, 259, 264, 281–286 colonialism and postcolonialism, 5, 9, 14, 19, 37, 41, 44, 57, 148, 174, 180, 227, 285 concepts vs. constructs, 53–58, 74, 77–78, 87–90, 112, 120, 185, 187, 200 Condé, Maryse, 10–11, 13, 19, 117, 121–122, 158–162, 164–165, 167–170, 175, 179–180, 184, 191, 283–286 I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, 10, 13, 117, 122, 160 Debord, Guy, 7–8, 62–65, 215 Ellul, Jacques, 3, 63–64, 187, 215, 294n33–35 Elsaesser, Thomas, 3, 45, 47–48, 53

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empathy, 6, 22, 34, 122–123, 130, 142, 147, 150, 153, 164, 189, 215, 224–225, 239, 284, 290n9, 290n10 empathic unsettlement, 35–36, 42, 49–50, 55, 58, 122, 290n9 facts vs. events, 4–6, 11, 20, 22, 33, 39, 54, 64, 69, 77, 89, 92, 97, 107, 121, 125, 127, 136, 138, 169, 189, 222, 228, 242, 248–249, 257, 276, 278, 280, 282 fantastic (the), 61, 85, 89–96, 99–103, 108, 110, 136, 215, 263, 297n48 fantasy, 9, 17–18, 41, 43, 52, 56–59, 61, 66–70, 84–90, 94, 96, 100, 110, 113, 121, 175, 185, 198–200, 207, 210, 219–220, 231–232, 235, 239, 260, 273–275, 280, 291n15, 295n40, 297n46–49 Faris, Wendy B., 103–104, 106–107, 111–113, 155, 299n61 Farrell, Kirby, 29, 33–34, 36, 39, 290n7, 300n65 Felman, Shoshanna, 30, 46–47, 158, 292n23 felt reality, 69, 81, 83, 85, 112, 118, 121–122, 164, 168, 170, 244, 260, 275 Fick, Carolyn E., 126–130, 162, 300n67, 301n71 Fischer, Sibylle, 137, 139–141 Freud, Sigmund, 10, 27–32, 53–54, 86, 93, 101, 145, 153, 159, 164, 174, 233, 278, 289n2, 289n5 García Márquez, Gabriel, 14–19, 70, 79, 105, 174–175, 179–182, 184–185, 188, 191–194, 197–198, 203, 207, 212, 216, 234, 239, 258, 260, 274, 282–285, 303n75

García Márquez, Gabriel (continued ) One Hundred Years of Solitude, 14, 16, 174–193, 198, 208, 211, 216, 274, 282, 284, 303n75 Glissant, Édouard, 10, 118–120, 139–140, 152 Grass, Günter, 2, 10, 19–21, 131, 161–163, 203–207, 243–264, 271, 280, 285, 304n81, n83; The Tin Drum, 19, 243–264, 304n82 guilt, 19–21, 37, 137, 145, 154, 237, 239, 244–246, 253, 256, 259, 265–268, 304n81 Hassan, Ihab, 70–73, 296n42 Heberle, Mark A., 267–270, 275 heteroglossia, 21, 49, 57, 246, 248 history, 7, 9, 11–17, 21–23, 25–26, 30, 33–34, 36–37, 40–41, 46–47, 53, 55, 58, 63, 69, 71, 74–79, 81, 83, 85–86, 97, 99, 107, 110–111, 118–125, 129, 147–150, 152, 159, 161, 164, 168–180, 185–186, 188–189, 195–196, 198, 200–203, 209–212, 215–218, 220–221, 224–230, 239, 242, 252, 254–255, 265, 269–270, 289n6, 290n10, 293n26, 296n44, 300n65, n67, 302n73, 303n76, 304n82; historical text, 127–129, 141–142 Holocaust, 5, 9–10, 17–20, 37, 41–44, 57, 195, 217–227, 233–243, 252–257, 262, 285, 304n80 Hutcheon, Linda, 72, 77–78, 83 hyperreality, 9, 59, 61, 64, 74, 78, 81, 111, 113, 123, 176, 284 hyperreal (the), 8–9, 61, 64–65, 78, 81, 113–114, 118, 123, 199

Index Jackson, Rosemary, 85, 93–94, 297n47 Jameson, Fredric, 4, 73–75 Janet, Pierre, 54–56, 294n30, n31, n32 Kaplan, E. Ann, 3, 22, 285 Kolk, Bessel A. van der and Onno van der Hart, 32, 54–56, 164, 255, 294n30–32 Kreitman, Norman, 87–90, 97, 297n49 Lacan, Jacques, 13, 32, 51–53, 66, 68, 75, 88, 144, 190, 257, 293n28, 295n36 LaCapra, Dominick, 35, 43–46, 49–50, 122, 139, 147, 153, 290n9, 292n21, 300n68 language 4, 10–11, 15–16, 26–27, 41–53, 57–58, 65, 68, 70–75, 83–84, 87–88, 103, 106–107, 110–111, 115, 118–119, 138, 141, 145, 149, 152–153, 157, 187–188, 192, 194, 196–201, 206, 213–214, 225–228, 238, 246, 252, 258, 260, 272–273, 283–286, 291n14, 292n18, 294n32, 295n40, 296n42, 303n75 testimonial language, 27, 46–48, 51, 53, 58 See also heteroglossia Laub, Dori, 30, 46–50, 195, 289n3 Levi, Primo, 50, 202, 217, 220, 241, 243, 303n79 Leydesdorff, Selma et al., 27, 30, 37–38, 290n8, 291n11, 293n27 Lifton, Robert, 162, 292n19, 295n39 Lucy, Niall, 75, 79 Lyotard, Jean-François, 70–72, 296n45

327

magical realism, 4, 7–9, 14, 23, 43, 61–62, 70–76, 83–86, 89, 94–115, 124–126, 130, 133, 143, 155, 157, 164, 174, 182–185, 193–194, 197, 202, 204, 210, 216, 260, 263, 265, 274–275, 277, 279, 281–284, 303n75, n77, 305n86; categories, 105–106 history of the term, 4, 7–9, 43, 61–62, 70–76, 94–98 traits, 102–104 Malamud, Bernard, 17–19, 220–234, 240, 242, 283, 285; The Fixer, 17, 222–226 Manzanas, Ana María, 7–8, 105–107 marvelous real, 101, 124, 131, 143, 156, 279 McHale, Brian, 13, 71, 74, 77, 81, 94–95, 104–105, 109, 120–126, 168, 170, 296n43, 298n53, 300n63 memory, 1, 3–4, 6, 9–10, 15, 21, 27, 31–32, 38–41, 45, 47–48, 51, 53–57, 63, 86–90, 98, 123, 125–126, 145, 148, 154, 159, 163, 171, 178, 181, 185–187, 194, 196–197, 203, 214, 218, 221–222, 225, 239, 241, 259, 271, 273–275, 277, 281–282, 285, 291n15, n17, 293n24, n27, 294n30, n31, n32, 297n49, 302n73 multidirectional memory, 10, 171, 285 narrative memory, 4, 6, 15, 27, 32, 39, 54, 56–58, 98, 123, 197, 225, 266, 274, 281–282, 291n15, 294n31 prosthetic memory, 3

328

THE TRAUMATIC IMAGINATION

memory (continued ) traumatic memory, 4–6, 27, 37–38, 54, 56–58, 149, 178, 181, 190, 218, 225, 235, 245, 255–257, 266, 268, 274, 276, 282, 294n31 Minta, Stephen, 175, 179, 181–182, 185, 189–191 O’Brien, Tim, 2, 10, 19–22, 244, 247, 265–280, 284, 305n86 Going after Cacciato, 19, 244, 267, 269, 273–280 Oliver, Kelly, 50–51, 293n26 Olsen, Lance, 85–86, 297n48 pain, 9, 12, 27, 37, 50, 57–58, 80–81, 83–84, 122, 129–130, 132–133, 141, 144, 147, 149, 159, 161, 165–166, 185, 191, 196, 213–214, 216, 219, 222, 224–225, 228, 240, 242, 268–269, 283, 293n25; pain and imagination, 83–84 Parkinson–Zamora, Lois, 106–108, 112, 115,142, 167, 183, 299n58, 299n61 postmodernism, 4, 71–75, 85, 94, 110–111, 296n43 real (the), 7–9, 13–14, 25, 32, 47, 51–53, 56, 58–70, 74–75, 77, 79, 84, 88, 90–91, 94, 97, 99, 102, 108–111, 113, 115, 120, 123–126, 147, 160, 170–171, 182, 185, 192, 202–203, 215, 259, 269, 293n28, 294n29, 299n62 realeme, 13, 15, 120–121, 126–128, 136, 143, 160–161, 168, 170, 202, 300n63

realism, 6, 9, 41, 43, 52, 57, 70, 98–99, 103, 106–108, 113, 138, 140, 167, 199, 207, 216, 265, 273, 275 mimesis, 8, 43–44, 62, 106–107, 112, 199, 206, 216 representation, 4, 6–9, 11, 26, 32–33, 35, 39–47, 51, 57–58, 62–66, 70, 73–81, 84, 88, 94–96, 99, 103, 106–113, 118, 123, 137, 139, 143, 159, 180, 186–187, 198–199, 215–216, 218–219, 221, 237, 242–244, 250, 252, 259, 282, 284, 287, 291n12, n13, 303n75 traumatic realism, 43–45, 138, 194 Reder, Michael, 202, 208, 303n76 repetition compulsion, 18, 32, 235, 278, 289n5 Rhys, Jean, 10–13, 19, 117–121, 143–166, 179–180, 282, 284 Wide Sargasso Sea, 10, 12, 117, 121, 143–166, 282 Rosenberg, Tina, 176–177, 302n72 Rothberg, Michael, 9–10, 44, 145, 171, 194, 285 Rushdie, Salman, 14–16, 18–20, 111, 173–175, 183, 197–216, 227–229, 234, 246, 252, 258, 260, 282–285, 303n76 Midnight’s Children, 14–15, 173, 175, 183, 197–199, 204, 208–216, 227, 282 Sanga, Jaina C., 197, 206, 210, 303n77 Scarry, Elaine, 83–84, 133

Index Scholes, Robert, 62, 68–69, 99, 298n57 Schroeder, Eric James, 269–270, 273–276, 305n86 scriptor, 80, 88, 91, 296n45 Simpkins, Scott, 112, 167 simulation and simulacrum, 8, 11, 30, 62, 64–66, 68, 73–74, 77–78, 81, 90, 110, 113, 118, 123, 133, 139, 164, 171, 216, 284, 289n4, 295n37, n38, 300n62 Skibell, Joseph, 16–19, 220–221, 233–240, 242, 283–285 A Blessing on the Moon, 16–17, 233–240 slavery, 5, 9–14, 19, 37, 41, 44, 57, 117–119, 121, 123, 125, 127, 129–131, 133, 135, 137, 139, 141, 143–145, 147, 149–153, 155, 157–165, 167, 169–171, 179, 285, 300n64 spectacle, 7–9, 62–66, 111, 150, 191, 269, 295n35 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 148 Tal, Kali, 29, 36, 42–43, 291n12, 292n18 testimony, 46–51, 58, 144, 158, 169, 180, 214, 216, 225, 289n3, 293n24, n26; testimonial language, 27, 46–48, 51, 53, 58 textualization of the reader, 7, 91–92, 94, 108, 114, 138, 168 Timmerman, John H., 85, 88–89, 113, 297n46 Todorov, Tzvetan, 86, 91–96, 101, 103, 297n48, 298n53

329

trauma, 1, 3, 5–6, 9–10, 12–23, 25–59, 69, 71, 81, 89, 94, 96, 98, 111, 117–121, 125–126, 130, 136–137, 139–140, 143–156, 158, 160–161, 164, 166, 168–171, 174–175, 178, 180–181, 189, 191, 194–197, 201, 214, 216, 218–220, 228, 230, 234–235, 237, 240, 242–247, 253, 255–257, 259–261, 265–269, 271–273, 276, 280–287, 289n3, n6, n7, 290n7, n8, n10, n11, 291n11, n12, 292n18, n19, n22, 293n24, n27, 294n29, 300n65, n67, n68, 302n73, n74, 303n78 acting out, 12–13, 16, 18, 20, 32, 35, 44–45, 58, 150, 153–155, 174, 235, 246, 269, 276, 286; historical trauma, 10, 12–13, 16, 19, 34, 125, 130, 139–140, 143–144, 147, 153, 164, 171, 174–175, 201, 214, 240, 243, 255, 259, 302n74 history of the term, 25–38 loss, 5, 8, 12, 15, 19, 33–34, 46, 66, 69–70, 85, 103, 117, 134, 139–140, 143, 145–147, 153, 164, 170–171, 179, 186–187, 195, 197, 201, 219, 225, 237, 239, 243, 246–247, 257, 285, 295n37, 300n68 mourning, 3, 153, 164, 247, 290n10 perpetrator’s trauma, 246, 256, 267 prosthetic trauma, 3 psychic numbing, 2, 14, 22, 48, 151, 154, 178, 194, 212, 257, 284 structural trauma, 15, 118–119, 139, 146, 197

330

THE TRAUMATIC IMAGINATION

trauma (continued ) transgenerational trauma, 1, 9, 16, 19, 139, 154, 164, 169, 211 traumatic imagination, 5–6, 9, 12, 15, 23, 26–27, 35, 39, 57–58, 61, 70, 75, 80–81, 84, 90, 94, 96–98, 111, 126, 129, 131–132, 137–139, 144, 161, 164, 170, 174, 179–180, 189, 197, 204, 211, 220, 225, 230, 245–246, 255, 257–258, 267, 273–275, 281–284, 296n42 traumatic memory. See memory traumatic neurosis, 29, 289n2 traumatization, 1–3, 14, 16, 19, 22, 34–35, 42–43, 58, 81, 114, 123, 144, 159, 168, 181, 224–225, 266–267, 275, 280, 284, 286, 290n9 vicarious traumatization, 1, 3, 14, 19, 22, 34–35, 43, 58, 114, 123, 159, 168, 181, 224–225, 284, 286, 290n9 working through, 10, 12–14, 16, 19–20, 31, 35, 44–45, 96, 139, 153, 155, 164–165, 169–170, 196, 211, 230, 246, 255, 266, 272, 275–276, 285–287, 302n74

Vice, Sue, 221, 238, 304n80 violence, 1–2, 4–5, 10, 12–16, 18–20, 22, 25–26, 36–40, 67, 75, 118, 122, 126, 128–130, 136–137, 141–142, 147, 149–151, 154, 156, 165, 175–180, 185, 188–190, 192, 202, 211–212, 223–225, 228, 230, 234, 241, 244, 252, 255–256, 258, 260–262, 272–273, 285, 287, 290n7, 293n24, 302n72, n73, n74 historical violence, 19, 122, 136, 149, 154, 260, 262

uncanny (the), 6, 26, 61, 70, 73, 89, 91–93, 101–103, 105, 110, 156–157

Žižek, Slavoj, 3, 8, 13, 51–52, 63, 66–70, 115, 144, 190, 215, 293n28, 295n41

Warnes, Christopher, 4, 93, 106, 135, 180, 185, 187, 202, 216 Webb, Barbara J., 125, 129 Weisgerber, Jean, 98, 109–110, 193, 298n56, 299n59, n60 witnessing, 2–3, 6, 14–15, 19, 22, 36, 45–46, 48, 50–51, 80, 136– 137, 143, 158, 160, 165, 180–181, 194–195, 218, 221, 242, 245, 261, 267, 283–285, 293n26–27 bearing witness, 2, 15, 19, 36, 39–40, 46, 50, 96, 164, 180, 214, 218, 221, 241–242, 265, 284–285, 287, 293n26 proxy witnessing, 136, 242