Kind One by Laird Hunt, or a Tale of a Real Twice Lost: Writing the Individual and Collective Memory of Slavery

Abstract

This article purposes to examine the specific resources of fiction to overcome the resistance of the real, here the brutal experience of slavery, to convey the extreme character of this experience and to animate the collective memory of it against the risks of denial or forgetfulness.We first examine how the novel draws upon history while ostensibly rejecting its chronological markers and its explanatory discourse, to favor the mediation of story-telling and its dynamics of symbolization. Indeed, Hunt invents a hybrid form of fictional historical testimony in which the expressive power of tales and myths arouses the reader’s imagination while composing a transitional object for the memory of slavery to be evoked and passed on.We then go on to study specific aspects of the novel’s poetics of indirection showing how Hunt resorts to allegories, metaphors and the structural mechanisms of trauma to convey the characters’ experience of “the real”, as they have witnessed the veil of language being torn asunder by traumatic violence.