“This text deletes itself”: Traumatic Memory and Space-Time in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story

Abstract

The group of and literary theorists whom I would loosely categorize as practitioners of theory--including, most notably, Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, and Dominick LaCapra--share several assumptions. Their ideas all derive to large extent from Freudian conceptions of memory and trauma, and they all emphasize temporal aspects of psychic trauma: Caruth, for instance, describes traumatic encounter as a break in mind's experience of time (61). Implicit in this conception of trauma, as well, is assumption that is an individual and private phenomenon. And they all suggest, moreover, that manifests itself primarily as loss of language, coupled paradoxically with compulsion to talk about that loss. The corollary of this point is that for traumatic memory disorders is some variant of cure. For some theorists, this is task of formal psychoanalytic therapy: Dori Laub, for instance, argues that therapy is a process of constructing narrative, of reconstructing history and essentially, of re-externalizing (Felman and Laub 69). For LaCapra, testimonial is more effective of constructing narratives around traumatic occurrences: witnessing based on memory ... provides insight into lived experience and its transmission in language and gesture (History and Memory 11). Such conceptions of trauma, memory, and testimony have been very influential in design and in study of South Africa's transition to democratic rule--and especially of Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). One of my tasks in this article is to show that this talking cure paradigm of TRC is inadequate in itself to account for complex dynamics that emerged from and shaped South Africa's revolutionary transition due to that paradigm's tendency toward depoliticized individualist psychology. Certainly there are exceptions to this rule, especially among critics in American studies--those like Kali Tal, Ron Eyerman, and E. Ann Kaplan, who in different ways theorize collective and transgenerational traumas through material, visual, and oral culture. Eyerman's formulation of cultural trauma within context of African-American descendents of slaves is particularly useful: As opposed to psychological or physical trauma, which involves wound and experience of great emotional anguish by an individual, refers to dramatic loss of identity and meaning, tear in social fabric, affecting group of people that has achieved some degree of cohesion (2). A central premise of this essay will be that we need to understand of various groups in South Africa in precisely such collective terms of rupture and social dislocation. Unfortunately, though, even as these scholars have complicated and enriched discourses of in context of American race relations, Vietnam War, 9/11, and so on, South African studies (especially as practiced outside of South Africa) has often been dominated by more reductive notions of confession and cure. Indeed, it is tempting to see TRC, which held public hearings from both confessed perpetrators and survivors of apartheid violence, as powerful instrument for restoring language and narrative to individuals. Susan VanZanten Gallagher, for instance, praises TRC for its confessional mode (179-80); and Teresa Godwin Phelps, in her comparative study of truth commissions, emphasizes need for victim to reclaim her ability to articulate her (5): the turning of inchoate pain and grief into narrative gives victim control and distance from traumatic event and empowers victim to get on with his or her life (57). These critics highlight important strengths of South African TRC process; there are indeed some who gave testimony at TRC and found relief or healing there. These critics, moreover, generally do point to ways that TRC attempted to weave larger national narrative of overcoming injustice out of individual stories of victims and perpetrators. …