Representational Modes of Traumatic Events in South Asian

Fiction and the Question of Genre

Khan Touseef OsmanAssistant Professor

Daffodil International UniversityBangladesh

Partition fiction in the 1980s• The anti-Sikh riots in 1984 following Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination• The emergence of subaltern historiography • A new enthusiasm in archiving oral narratives• An awareness by creative writers of fictions written on traumatic events like the Holocaust or

colonial oppression in other languages and places

The pathology of trauma: A radical rupture in the temporal and symbolic order

Trauma and realismAlthough 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 [and also the Partition] have constituted themselves as “histories” of extreme events hardly open to rational reflection or understanding. (9)~Eugene L. Avra in The Traumatic Imagination

In the face of this [symbolic and chronological] ‘rupture’, trauma fiction shares trauma theory's epistemological belief that the Holocaust [or any other traumatic event] is not knowable through traditional frameworks of knowledge and that it cannot be represented by conventional historical, cultural and autobiographical narratives. The Holocaust past, that is to say, cannot be narrated in an objective [or realistic] mode without omitting all that is most significant to understanding its power over the present. Both trauma theory and trauma fiction are committed to exploring new modes of referentiality, which work by means of figuration and indirection. (83)~Anne Whitehead in Trauma Fiction

Traumatic realismMaus is Art Spiegelman’s famous graphic novel serialized from 1980 to 1991, notable for its postmodernist representation of races as animals: Jews as mice, Germans as cats and so on. In the above mentioned contribution, depicting the artist (who is a Jew and, therefore, a mouse-like figure) looking at a ‘real’ mouse on his palms while the Micky Mouse forms the background, Rothberg detects a parallel of representational demands of reality or the objective truth of trauma on the one hand and the presence of market forces of image circulation in a globalized world on the other. To be more specific, Rothberg three conflicting demands in the representation of trauma: “a demand for documentation, a demand for reflection on the formal limits of representation, and a demand for the risky public circulation of discourses on the events. (7)”

Traumatic realism (continued)Acknowledging the crisis of referentiality and the inadequacy of realism, Rothberg still sees a “…possibility of indirect reference through the self-conscious staging of the conundrum of representing historical extremity. The mouse that the artist holds in his hands is not the real itself, but it is an object of knowledge and an effect of the real that points toward the real's foundational absence from representation. The abject and unsightly body of the mouse moves us toward the site of trauma.” (103-104, emphasis original)

Spiegelman’s drawing demonstrates what Rothberg means by traumatic realism by highlighting its dual commitment: “it seeks to present the real by representing the fictionality of the realist contract; and it recognizes realist discourse's production of the real as an accidental effect of representation. As such, this drawing is an example of what I call traumatic realism. (105)”

Traumatic realism and Baudrillard’s third stage of simulation (in which an image conceals the absence of any basic reality)

The third stage of simulation and trauma

The recovery from trauma starts with a reconstruction of the violent experience in language, weaving the fragments into a coherent story that can function as surrogate memory for the gap trauma has left in the psyche. This surrogate memory is meant to produce an illusion of consistency in the events the traumatized has encountered, thereby recovering some sort of normalcy. The point to emphasize here is that the narrative reconstruction does not require or claim to be the truth—it is just a trick that works. In other words, a fake presence of reality is feigned when there is none just as the coherent story of the surrogate memory is made up to conceal the absence of the event in the psyche.

Features of trauma fiction:• A disruption of the causal and the chronological. This may lead to non-linear and unrealistic (for want of a

better word) narrative.• A profound skepticism to metanarraives and a celebration of the provisional and contingent, consequences

of which may include the representation of alternative histories and localized views of history. • Privileging of the connotative elements of language that results in empathy inducing active-imaginative

reading on the part of the reader who is aware of entering a fictional world beyond everyday reality and vigilant against prurience at the same time.

• Foregrounding of ontological, epistemological and representational crises rather than a naïve assumption of a direct referentiality. This may manifest in the text as narcissistic metafictional elements.

• The disappearance of the real into the hyperreal. Appearances are likely to be only skin-deep and made up of tissues of other appearances.

• Underlining the intertextual elements so as to make the reader conscious of the act of revisiting history in fiction with irony, but not innocence.

• Indirect representation, which may take different forms specific to each text.

Questions and Observations

Thanks!