Resonances of the Negative: Traumatic Affect and Empty Spaces of Writing

Abstract

At the heart of literary theories of trauma is the trope of aporia: the unrepresentable, unknowable event that enters into literary language through its fracturing, its falling short of meaning-making (Caruth 1996, Felman and Laub 1992). Yet this aporia is more than collapse of meaning into paradox: it is a site of affective intensity. While this traumatic affect can arrive through language, it also emerges in the resonance of blank space – in writing that embraces absences of text. Tracing these resonances of the negative across two multimodal texts, this paper shows how the material limits of printed words and their relation to empty space evoke traumatic affect. Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition (2015) by Crofton Black and Edmund Clark uses the resonance between documentary evidence, short essays and photographs of emptied sites and spaces to testify to torture and rendition. Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) by Claudia Rankine deploys poetry, layout and artistic images to reimagine the traumas of Blackness in America. Together, these readings show how writing can use negative space as a site of resonance between forms, transforming the limits of written text into new zones for giving life to traumatic affects and granting new nuance to the capacity of literary theory to account for trauma.