Trauma, Memory, and History in Marlene van Niekerk’s The Way of the Women

Abstract

The problematical nature of representation of trauma in literary and historical texts has been productively explored in work of trauma theorists. In emphasizing centrality of unassimilated nature of trauma that demands a continued return to 'wound' (the original meaning of word 'trauma') that represents damage inflicted on both body and mind, Cathy Caruth, for example, suggests that if Freud turns to literature to describe experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in complex relation between knowing and not knowing.1 She continues:it is always story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in attempt to tell us of or truth that is not otherwise available [...]. This truth, in its delayed appearance and its belated address, cannot be linked only to what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our very actions and our language. (4)The difficulty of narrating a past is partly related to difficulty of coming to terms with crises of death and survival, as well as with unrepresentability of what Caruth suggests is unclaimed experience. While history seems unable to imagine unimaginable, literature can engage metaphorically, formally, and stylistically with silences and aporias. Thus imaginative qualities of literature can bear witness to the crisis within history which precisely cannot be articulated, witnessed in given categories of history itself.2 While most trauma theory has, of course, been concerned with Holocaust as its central experience, it is not surprising that, for contemporary writers in a post-apartheid South Africa, novel of trauma has continued to provide a productive genre for exploration of 'unfinished business'. This is not just because it provides a thematic opportunity to uncover secret or hidden history of past (what Caruth refers to above as reality or truth) but also because it engages a style and form that, like workings of memory and psychoanalysis, are in a state of constant return that mimics repetitive intrusion of memory3 and that transforms memory into narrative: from present to past, from personal to collective memory, from individual to official records of past, from known to unknown, from representation in tropes of trauma to an awareness of ultimate unrepresentability of trauma.The text of trauma itself is therefore essentially and of its nature unstable, always turning back, and it is this very instability that points partial and partisan nature of 'official' historical accounts that have often papered over cracks or gaps of what might be termed traumatic history.4 Vickroy sees such fictional texts that enact history as employing specific narrative approaches that convert historical into personal trauma:Social conflicts are enacted in characters' personal conflicts, where historical trauma is personalized by exploring its effects in violations and in sexuality, or in struggle to achieve emotional intimacy [...] body becomes testing ground of human endurance. (168)With these elements of fiction in mind, most particularly centrality of trope of bodily violations and wounds, it is clear that Marlene van Niekerk's The Way of Women, translated by Michiel Heyns into English (2006) from original Afrikaans version entitled Agaat (2004), provides a useful focus for an analysis of treatment of trauma, memory, and history in South African novel. Its central character, focalizer, and 'narrator' of text, Milla de Wet, aged seventy, is lying paralyzed on her sickbed, locked up (20) in her own body while waiting to die from progressively degenerative motor neuron disease, in farmhouse she has lived in all her life, on farm she has inherited from her mother and further back through family's matrilineal line. …