Progress, Trauma and Narrative Possibilities in Nora Ikstena’s Soviet Milk

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article discusses the tension between the temporality of progress, characteristic of the modern time regime and totalitarian politics of time, and the nature of traumatic memory, as they are embedded in Nora Ikstena’s novel Soviet Milk (2015). Ikstena’s widely translated work is particularly informative in this aspect because it offers a detailed and self-reflexively narrated account of living during the Soviet occupation of Latvia, illuminating the way individual memory of troubling past events clashed with sociopolitical frameworks that endorsed the forgetting of its own victims. In my reading of this novel, I draw on relatively recent studies of experience of time and trauma that have shifted from the unspeakability of trauma to its cultural contexts and narrative possibilities by giving a realistic depiction of suffering and its aftermath. Ultimately, I turn to the question of the ethics of form to show how Ikstena employs the temporality of progress to enhance our understanding of specific historical others, covering also the tie between persistent or structural traumatization and melancholia.