Trauma, Australia and Gail Jones’s Fiction (1996-2007)

On the other hand, it is precisely this view of trauma as that which resists comprehension and representation that intrinsically links it to the concept of narrative. As Roger Luckhurst puts it, “in its shock impact trauma is anti-narrative, but it also generates the manic production of retrospective narratives that seek to explicate the trauma” (2008, 80). The emergence of trauma studies has provided writers, and I would also add literary critics, with new tools to represent and analyse the concept of trauma. In Anne Whitehead’s view, the “encounter with trauma” has transformed fiction, giving rise to the emergence of a new genre, which she labels as “trauma fiction” (2004). This type of writing appears to emulate the workings of trauma through its formal and stylistic features. Imitating the traumatised subject’s split identity, disrupted memory and experience of post-traumatic symptoms, trauma is characterised by the use of a fragmented and disrupted structure, time and space discontinuities and overlapping, seemly illogical change of narrative voice, and some key stylistic features such as intertextuality and repetition, Whitehead points out (2004, 3; 84).

For Caruth and other critics such as Kai Erikson (1995), Bessel A. Van der Kolk and Onno Van der Hart (1995), and Dominick LaCapra (2001), these acting-outs, that is, the re-experiencing of the past event at a later stage and as here and now, represent a way to break the amnesiac circle which entraps the victim. Since the event is not fully acknowledged at the moment when it occurs, but is repressed and locked in the unconscious, its after-effects symbolise a return of the repressed which seeks to be finally explained. Bearing these ideas in mind, the aforementioned critics concur that the notion of trauma challenges the straightforward referentiality of history and demands its rethinking. In this sense, Caruth argues, trauma may be seen as “a link between cultures” (1995, 11), since some unveiled truth and knowledge can be gained by listening to the other’s wound. As she points out, the belatedness of trauma brings to the fore the fact that “history, like trauma, is never one’s own, that history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s voice” (1996, 24).

On the other hand, the relation between these two critical fields, trauma studies and postcolonial studies, has not always been an easy one. In Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (1996a), Kalí Tal complained that most of the critical literature on trauma that arose in the mid-1990s laid heavy emphasis on Euro-centric Western psychoanalytical frameworks and traumas, while neglecting other traumas and outstanding critical voices, such as that of the Afro-American W. E. B. Du Bois. More recently, the editors of the special issue on postcolonial trauma novels that was published by the journal Studies in the Novel criticised what they regarded as trauma studies’ “one-sided focus” (Craps and Buelens 2008, 2) on Western traumas, with the trauma of the Holocaust being its touchstone. Although Caruth’s trauma model insisted on the binding function between cultures that her concept of trauma can have, the tendency of trauma studies to “ignor[e]‌ and marginalis[e] non-Western traumatic events and histories and non-Western theoretical work” appears to have had, according to Steff Craps and Gert Buelens, the opposite effect: rather than promoting solidarity between cultures, trauma studies’ heavy focus on the West seems to “assist in the perpetuation of Eurocentric views and structures that maintain or widen the gap between the West and the rest of the world” (2008, 2).

The study of historical psychological traumas such as the Holocaust, which, as has been stated before, has been taken as the template model for the analysis of other traumas, has generally focused on the effects that the traumatic experience has had on the individual’s mind. However, as Dolores Herrero and Sonia Baelo-Allué and other critics have also contended, the understanding of trauma as a personal psychological experience presents several flaws when trying to apply it to the analysis of colonial traumas. Firstly, Herrero and Baelo-Allué remark, it runs the risk of opening a wide gap between facts and causes, “thus blurring the importance of the historical and social context, which is particularly relevant in postcolonial trauma narratives” (2011, xi). Similarly, Ruth Leys (2000), Victoria Burrows (2004; 2008) and Irene Visser (2011) criticise Caruth’s vision of trauma as a bond between cultures for not having taken into consideration important issues, such as the historical context, power structures, gender, social, racial and class factors. Secondly, as Laura Brown (1995), Steff Craps and Gert Buelens (2008), together with Lucy Bond in her co-authored volume with Craps (2020, 108–109), have pointed out, the understanding of trauma as the consequence of an unprecedented violent event also appears to be insufficient for the study of colonial traumas. As these critics observe, the traumas suffered by some minority groups, such as women, people of colour and homosexuals, do not stem from the occurrence of a single event, but from their constant exposure to violence and a patriarchal, racist and homo-phobic discourse that marginalises them. Finally, unlike psychological trauma, “colonial trauma is […] a collective experience, which means that its specificity cannot be recognised unless the object of trauma research shifts from the individual to larger social entities,” Craps and Buelens state (2008, 4). The psychoanalytical suggestion that recovery from trauma may be achieved by the individual’s introspective and psychic process of working through is regarded as inadequate, as it seems to disregard institutional responsibilities and the demand that victims should be socially compensated for the damage and injustice committed against them. In this sense, the application of Caruth’s model of psychological individual trauma to the analysis of cultural traumas can be seen as a way to evade personal and public responsibilities.