In the wake of trauma: visualizing the unspeakable/unthinkable in Marie Darrieussecq and Hélène Lenoir

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In the course of the last thirty years trauma studies has been one of the fastest growing interdisciplinary fields. Arising in part as a result of renewed medical interest in the effects of traumatic stress following the Vietnam War and developed through the work conducted in the 1990s by literary critics, cultural studies specialists, and historians, as well as by sociologists, anthropologists, and legal scholars, trauma studies has generated a vast array of projects and publications that straddle disciplinary boundaries and draw on a broad theoretical tradition. For many researchers working in the area, contemporary French prose narrative has proved to be a very fertile area of enquiry. Seventy years after Vichy, sixty years after the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu, fifty years after the end of the Algerian War and the collapse of the remnants of its empire in Africa, France remains haunted by the part it played in the Holocaust and is only now beginning to acknowledge the atrocities of its colonial past, and its struggles to accommodate the horrific and shameful in its relatively recent history have been translated into countless fictional, autofictional, and biographical narratives. At the same time the texts produced by secondand third-generation descendants of survivors of the Shoah or by the children and grandchildren of immigrants from former French colonies have repeatedly explored the roots, processes, and effects of intergenerational trauma. Alongside these strands of historically grounded narrative, French fiction, autofiction, and autobiography of the final decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century have been characterised by a proliferation of texts that centre on a wide range of other traumatising experiences including illness, sudden death (including suicide), physical, psychological and sexual abuse, institutionalisation, domestic violence, and rape, and that explore the ways in which the individual, the family group, or the community attempt to accommodate those experiences. This explosion of fictional, autofictional, and autobiographical accounts has generated in turn a large body of critical work that, in addition to the multidisciplinary perspectives that it has offered on the (auto)fictional treatment of particular types of traumatic experience, has also explored a broad gamut of formal issues including: the interweaving of the realistic and the supernatural, the deployment of unstable, fragmented, or collective narrative voices, obsessive repetition, dislocation of chronological narrative order, the establishment of cross-textual correspondences and leitmotifs, intertextual rewriting, and — among the most frequently discussed topics of trauma literature studies — the various roles played by the ekphrastic photograph. That the photograph should figure so prominently in trauma narrative and, consequently, on the trauma studies research agenda is not surprising. Whether it be a documentary record of an accident, crime scene, or military atrocity, the blurred likenesses of long-dead strangers on an animated postcard street-scene, the images of deserted human constructions, or an ostensibly commonplace family snapshot, the photograph has long been associated with loss and the unresolved feelings that accompany it. For Kracauer, Benjamin, Barthes, and Sontag, the photograph is inextricably bound up with melancholy. To Sontag, photographs ‘state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photos of people’, while Barthes, as he contemplates the Winter Garden photograph of his mother, must confront the fact that he is unable to make the transition from grief to mourning. For others — the survivors of atrocity, the descendents of survivors — the photograph can play a crucial role in the constitution of his/her own experience, or it may be one of the ‘primary documents of postmemory, structuring its shape and content’. However, while it is indisputable that the privileged position held by the photograph in the analysis of recent and contemporary French trauma narrative is wholly justified by the wealth of the primary material, one unfortunate side effect of this focus has been the relative neglect of the roles played by literary references to other visual media such as painting and installation art. Although the corpus for such an enquiry is relatively limited, it nevertheless includes a number of hitherto un-researched or under-researched texts by prominent contemporary writers, including François Bon, Marie Darrieussecq, Jean Rouaud, Hélène Lenoir, Marie Redonnet, and Marie NDiaye.