The Splintered Glass: Facets of Trauma in the Post-Colony and Beyond

288 Pages·2011·2.142 MB·English

by  Dolores Herrero (editor), Sonia Baelo-Allu (editor)

The Splintered Glass
CROSS
Readings in Post/Colonial
ULTURES Literatures and Cultures in English

136

SERIES EDITORS
Gordon Collier Bénédicte Ledent Geoffrey Davis
(Giessen) (Liège) (Aachen)
CO-FOUNDING EDITOR
Hena Maes–Jelinek
The Splintered Glass
Facets of Trauma in the Post-Colony and Beyond
Edited by
Dolores Herrero and Sonia Baelo-Allué
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011
Cover image:
Bea Maddock
born 1934 Australia
Four-finger exercise for two hands 1982
photo-etched linocut, printed in process colour, from four blocks
printed image 53.4cm x 46.9cm
sheet 76.6 x 58.4 cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Gordon Darling Fund 1984

Cover design: Pier Post
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for
documents - Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3388-7
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0083-7
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2011
Printed in The Netherlands
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements vii
Introduction ix

FROM OFFICIAL HISTORY
TO INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE TRAUMA

Broken Memories of a Traumatic Past and the Redemptive
Power of Narrative in the Fiction of Edwidge Danticat
AITOR IBARROLA–ARMENDÁRIZ 3
“When the World is Free”: Traumatized Soldiers
in Patricia Grace’s Second World War Novel Tu
DONNA COATES 29
Passion to Pasyon: Playing Militarism
MERLINDA BOBIS 57
Poetics of Dislocation: Trauma, Language, Memory
MEENA ALEXANDER 81

WOMEN AND CULTURAL/COLONIAL TRAUMA

Trauma, Madness, and the Ethics of Narration in
J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country
SUSANA ONEGA 101
“Softer than Cotton, Stronger than Steel”: Metaphor and
Trauma in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night
MAITE ESCUDERO 135
Haunting Wounds: Genital Alterations,
Autobiography, and Trauma
CHANTAL ZABUS 153

THE AUSTRALIAN APOLOGY AND TRAUMA OF UNBELONGING

Personal Trauma/Historical Trauma
in Tim Winton’s Dirt Music
BÁRBARA ARIZTI 175
“Twisted Ghosts”: Settler Envy and Historical
Resolution in Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth
MARC DELREZ 191
The Trauma of Immigration and the Ethics of Self-Positioning
in Richard Flanagan’s The Sound of One Hand Clapping
HEINZ ANTOR 205
Inside Out in the Land Down Under: Reading
Trauma through Janette Turner Hospital’s Oyster
ISABEL FRAILE 221

Notes on Contributors 245
Index 251
Acknowledgements

The research carried out for the following contributions is part of a research project
financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN) and the
European Regional Fund (ERDF) (code HUM2007–61035). The authors are also
grateful for the support of the Government of Aragón and the University of Zaragoza.

Dolores Herrero and Sonia Baelo–Allué, “Introduction”;
Susana Onega, “Trauma, Madness, and the Ethics of Narration in J.M. Coetzee’s In the
Heart of the Country”;
Maite Escudero, “‘Softer than Cotton, Stronger than Steel’: Metaphor and Trauma in
Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night”;
Bárbara Arizti, “Personal Trauma/Historical Trauma in Tim Winton’s Dirt Music”;
Isabel Fraile, “Inside Out in the Land Down Under: Reading Trauma through Janette
Turner Hospital’s Oyster.”

::

Introduction

T
HE ESSAYS SELECTED FOR THIS BOOK tackle the topic of
cultural and personal trauma and the blurring of the two terms in
postcolonial narrative in English. To put it differently, they show
how individual trauma in literature has become one of the most common
ways of expressing and representing collective and, by extension, cultural and
ethnic traumas. As is well known, trauma studies became prominent in the
early to mid-1990s as an important sub-strand of ‘ethical criticism’, whose
most defining feature was an intense concern with the demands of otherness.
This explicit commitment to ethics set these approaches apart from the post-
structuralist criticism of the 1970s and 1980s from which they emerged. The
earlier formalist paradigm, so often accused of lacking any kind of serious
commitment to real-world issues such as history, politics, and ethics, was
eventually replaced by such historicist or culturalist approaches as the New
Historicism, cultural materialism, and cultural studies. Trauma studies could
therefore be regarded as “the reinvention in an ethical guise of this much
maligned textualism.”1 According to Cathy Caruth, one of the most outstand-
ing trauma theorists – together with Shoshana Felman, Geoffrey Hartman,
and Dominick LaCapra, to name but a few – a textualist approach, far from
detaching us from history, can grant us unique access to it. Caruth emphasizes
the ethical relevance of this formal scheme. As she sees it, the insights of
deconstructive and psychoanalytical criticism can help critics to better analyze
texts that bear witness to traumatic histories, thus rendering accessible to the
reader events and experiences that defy understanding and representation. In
“a catastrophic age” such as the one we are living in, Caruth goes on to argue,

1 Stef Craps & Gert Buelens, “Introduction: Postcolonial Trauma Novels,” Studies
in the Novel 40.1–2 (Spring–Summer 2008): 1.
x THE SPLINTERED GLASS 
“trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures,”2 since opening
oneself up to the trauma of another can lead to cross-cultural understanding
and to the possibility of new forms of community.
Even though Caruth mentions trauma as a link between cultures, in her
own study of the subject she has not focused on the cultural effects of trauma
but, rather, on its psychological consequences for the human mind. Her path-
breaking work – based on psychoanalysis and deconstruction – has generated
a mounting number of studies about psychological trauma and its effects on
the individual. Caruth’s theories are well-known and are used by our contribu-
tors in this volume. Trauma is a wound inflicted upon the mind that breaks the
victim’s experience of time, self, and the world, and that causes great emo-
tional anguish in the individual.3 It is a wound in the mind, not a wound in
society; it is a personal experience, not a social one. The symptoms which
trauma produces in the individual usually appear belatedly and may be suf-
fered by those directly involved or by secondary victims. However, if trauma
is to be seen as a link between cultures, there is a need to study cultural
trauma and its effects, not just on specific individuals but on whole societies
that have seen their sense of identity shattered by a traumatic experience. As
Ron Eyerman claims in connection with the trauma of slavery in the USA,
collective identity needs to be reconfigured through collective representation
to repair “the tear in the social fabric,”4 not just the tear in the individual
mind.
The effects of trauma were labelled in the American Psychiatric Associa-
tion’s Diagnostic Manual ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’ (PTSD), and the
term entered official diagnosis in the 1980s, after the effects of the Vietnam
War on veterans had been observed in the 1970s. Post-traumatic stress dis-
order is a cluster of symptoms which include repeated hallucinations, night-
mares and flashbacks, emotional numbing, somatic reactions, and an absence
of recall of the traumatic event.5 The types of trauma considered by the Amer-

2 Cathy Caruth, “Trauma and Experience: Introduction,” in Trauma: Explorations in
Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore MD & London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995): 11.
3 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore
MD & London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996): 3–4.
4 Ron Eyerman, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American
Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001): 4.
5 American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistic Manual (Washington
DC: APA, 4th rev. ed. 2000): 467–68.