Rehearsing Trauma: The Reader as Interrogator in Prison Narratives

Abstract

Summary Accounts of detention survivors exert pressure on the theoretical framework that reserves a role for the reader in a post-Freudian hermeneutics of catharsis. In analysing the prison narratives of Ruth First and Emma Mashinini, I explore the position of the imagined reader in the complex dynamic at work when writing emerges from a position of woundedness. A reappraisal of the role of the imagined reader is warranted, in order to accommodate both the formative communality that operates in these texts and the complexity of a political context where “the public” is both ally and adversary, simultaneously enabling and complicating a survivor's self-construction.The task of asserting a new self in writing, to contest the criminalising “vocabulary” of the state security system, is both undermined and made all the more urgent by the overwhelming self-doubt which that system induces. Narrative self-construction can be thought of as an appeal as much as an assertion of self. The paradigm of trauma studies potentially enables attentiveness to the anxiety and vulnerability of detention survival. However, that attentiveness is undermined by theoretical abstractions that locate catharsis deep within individualised subjects and by attempts to imagine human connectedness across a generalised conceptualisation of trauma.