Speech after Rape: Towards a Theological Poetics of Identity and Loss after Philomela's ‘Voice of the Shuttle’

Abstract

This article seeks to reconsider the tale of Philomela's ‘Voice of the Shuttle’ and recent criticism of the work from Patricia Klindienst and Geoffrey Hartman to exemplify the concerns in figuring a poetics that seeks to disclose and describe that which is essentially the unspeakable, namely rape. Central to this discussion are the following two concerns: First, what is the declaration of principle within a given work that attempts to speak of violence such as rape? Is it to speak the act anew as testimony? Is it to artificially suture the wounds that cannot be sutured? Second, how can art function as an incarnation of this coming together of form, content and import around the unspeakable such as rape, and what should this embodiment within literary space ultimately concern? It is the aim of this article to illustrate the way that speech after rape and violence moves into a refining of the category of what is considered speech, thereby calling for a poetics of communitas which does not merge identities to suture wounds of the unspeakable, rather liberates voices of both loss and hope.