Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
DQGWKH6HFUHWRI/LWHUDWXUHLQ6RXWK$IULFD
5RVDOLQG&0RUULV
Rosalind C. Morris
Early in her monumental novel, Middlemarch, George Eliot introduces a
chapter with a quotation from an unnamed play, wherein two gentlemen
exchange reflections on law and society. The first gentlemen remarks that an
ancient land in ancient oracles/Is called law-thirsty: all the struggle there/
Was after order and a perfect rule.1 The quotation in fact comes from a
drama that Eliot has imagined, probably based on her readings of the thenrecently translated works of Persian law that had come to be known as the
Zend Avesta. The referenced land in need of legal quenching is Arya (for
which we may now substitute an equally vague West). But the brief excerpt
from an imaginary play is otherwise ambiguous. If the second gentleman
responds to the first mans query by stating that the lands seeking law are
in fact to be found in human souls, there is in the reference to a desire for
perfect rule a shadow: the specter of an irremediable insufficiency. It remains
unclear, in Eliots text, whether the ancient land finally achieved a state of
lawfulness (and entered its own modernity) or whether it matured into the
realization that perfect rule is unattainable. In any case, the literary conceit
of an already existing play to which Eliot could refer allows her to ground
her own critique of those social norms that enjoyed the status of cultural
law in her time through an ironically invoked ancient tradition: Awoman
dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.2 As the novel unfolds, it is the perverse adherence to law
in the very attempt to transcend custom that ultimately entraps the doomed
Dorothea Brooke. Yet of all the forces discerned and described by Eliot in
this deeply insightful novel, perhaps none ring so perpetually true as the
comparative literature studies, vol. 48, no. 3, 2011.
Copyright 2011 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.
388
07/11/11 10:51 AM
i n t h e n a m e o f t r au m a
389
specter of a desire for law and for perfect lawfulnessand the menace of
absolute formalism that haunts it. For in the totalizations of formalism,
justice retreats.
If Shoshana Felman is correct, this desire for law is a historicizable
fact, one that assumed specific new dimensions in the twentieth century as
a result of the massification and intensification of trauma, partly because
of mechanized warfare. For it was during the twentieth century and iconically at the Nuremberg trials, she claims, that legal proceedings became the
venue for adjudicating responsibility for the traumas of war. According
toFelman, the twentieth century saw a convergence of cultural forces, such
that highly theatricalized legal trials came to provide a space in which private and collective traumas were connected, in the face of which law itself
was brought to crisis. This crisis of law also made trials the venues in which
could be enacted large-scale social crises, themselves the function of laws
incapacity to generate lawfulness. One may indeed extend Felmans reading to observe that these social crises occur within the aporetic space that
inevitably opens between law and lawfulness. In his treatise on the origin
of law, Minos, Plato, speaking through the persona of Socrates, argues that
law tends to the truth, the discovery of reality, and thus to the closure of
the space between being and representation, albeit one that is dangerously
vulnerable to being manipulated by the poet.3 If law was in force, therewould
be no crime, of course. However, lawfulness, the desire for a law that is not
completely in force, is already alienated from its origin and its goal: that
perfect law aspired to by Eliots Aryans.
According to Felman, it was under the extreme circumstances of mass
death in modern warfarethe totalized form of an exceptionality that
permits the killing normally prohibited by lawthat this aporia between
law andlawfulness became all too apparent. And it was in relation to this
widening gyre, she argues, that the trial offered itself as a paradigm for
achieving closure. Mass trauma was perhaps the inevitable result of the
totalization and modernization of war. But trauma is not merely an effect,
to be grasped at the level of the individual psyche; it is also the name for a
more general condition of unrepresentability. For Plato, of course, the aporia
between law and lawfulness was also the aporia between a perfect law, which
would be identical with reality, and laws, which were the writings of kings
and wise men.4 A state in which perfect law reigned would have been mute.
It is language, and specifically poetry, that risks departure from law for him,
and that seduces men from their proper tendencies to conform to reality. If, in
the end, law cannot escape its dependency on language, it works by effacing
that dependency. It is thus language that extols its own mimetic properties,
07/11/11 10:51 AM
390
C OM P A R A T I V E L I T E R A T U R E S T U D I E S
namely poetry, that makes men depart from their truth, according to Plato.
Now, modernity, for Felman, sees the inversion of this ancient but persisting
logic, such that if the trial offers itself as a mechanism of closure, literature
assumes the function of holding open the gap and of making testimony
to nonclosure, or the representation of nonrepresentability, the basis of its
own justice.5 Justice is here understood to exceed both law and lawfulness,
insofar as it pertains to the order of right rather than truth. It responds to
the question of what ought to be rather than how to make what is conform
to what should have been. This is why Plato suspected the poet, for poetry
introduced a third term into the seemingly closed opposition between law
and lawfulness.
If after the long sleep that Platos antithesis between law and literature
induced, literature nonetheless seeped into the modern courtroom via implicit
narratives, it did so only to become the scene of a collapsewhere the bodily
breakdown of the writer marked the site of representations incapacity for
mastery. In the context of the mass death occasioned by World War II,
writes Felman, this collapse signified trauma, and it was here that literature
was rejuvenated as a permanent supplement to the trial, precisely by virtue
of the legal spectacle, in which the demand for closure was felt to be unsupportable and inadequate to the enormity of the traumatic, experiential real.
Felman goes further than this to argue that literary narrative actually informs
the repetitive structure in legal trials and that it is this folding over of the
onestructure into the other, by which the legal trial comes to be inseparable
from the traumatic repetitions of literary and psychoanalytic narrative, that
ensures the continued and intensifying linkage between trauma and the trial
in both juridical and literary space.6
In this article, I do not attempt to engage the question of trauma and
trial at the level of generality and generalizability to which Felman addresses
herself. My task is more modest, namely to read an emergent discourse of
the unnarratable in relation to a certain desire for the law and in terms of a
problematic of naming within a theory of the juridical performative. Ifocus
on these questions as they have arisen in South Africa since the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), in the wake of which, I suggest,
therehas been a split within cultural discourses. On the one hand, there
has been a valorization and institutionalization of narrative testimony as a
primary mechanism for addressing and redressing collective traumas that
areunderstood to be, at least partially, excluded from the domain of recognized representation. This is perhaps most visible in the forms of museology
that have developed over the past decade and a half. On the other hand,
there has emerged an experimental repudiation of both confessional and
07/11/11 10:51 AM
i n t h e n a m e o f t r au m a
391
07/11/11 10:51 AM
392
C OM P A R A T I V E L I T E R A T U R E S T U D I E S
truth because it limited itself to the ideological conflict of the apartheid era.
Itfocused on the fight between white supremacist and antiracialist politics
but excluded the history of colonial capitalism and the question of benefit
from its purview, privileging instead a perpetrator/victim paradigm within
which the question of the beneficiary could not be asked.8
Quite simply, the TRC mimicked the structure of a legal trial without
being one and without entirely relinquishing the paradigm of the trial. The
confusion that this mimicry caused among those who sought to testify at the
TRC is a dimension of the process that has not been adequately addressed.
Not infrequently, perpetrators who were seeking amnesty, mistook their
task at the TRC as a demonstration of their innocence rather than an admission of their overdetermined guilt. In some of the cases that I have examined
in the gold-mining region near Johannesburg, this misrecognition appears to
have been informed at least partially by assumptions about how trials work
that had been gleaned from police procedural television and Hollywood narrative dramas.9 Misrecognizing the TRCs amnesty hearings for real trials,
these young perpetrators suffered the consequences of being in a venue
that could not adjudicate personal crime. They were elsewhere than law.
Iwould like to argue that they were in a domain that is closest (without being
identical) to literature, but in order to make thisclaimafewpreliminaries
are necessary.
Literature, as I understand it, following Derrida, is a strange institution
in which a speaking can occur that comes from no place in particular and
that cannot be assigned to any individual speaker, even when it can be said
to come from a character.10 All language exceeds all speakers, of course, but
literature avows this and makes of this avowal a raison dtre. I will return
to this issue below, but for now, let us simply remark that the strange institution of literature produces a gap between the world and the texta gap
that is never absolute, always unstable, and eternally under attack. To the
extent that the TRC made amnesty contingent on the demonstration that
individual acts were motivated by political forces external to the individual,
and to the extent that it demanded, at the same time, that the speakers in
the hearings demonstrate their lack of mastery over the discourse that had
captured them, it placed them in a position analogous (not identical) to that
of a character in a drama written elsewhere. Indeed, for many, the entire
process appeared to be stage-managed. This anxiety about stage management
fails to grasp the enormous if somewhat transient productivity of the TRC
in the South African national consciousness, but it also, if inadvertently,
grasps a crucial dimension of the scene, namely the affinity between victims
testimony and literature. It is no wonder that Jane Taylors play Ubu and the
07/11/11 10:51 AM
i n t h e n a m e o f t r au m a
393
07/11/11 10:51 AM
394
C OM P A R A T I V E L I T E R A T U R E S T U D I E S
the TRC is to appear coextensive with the real of which it is the suffering
guardian. It must therefore communicate a representational insufficiency.
And this insufficiency cannot be overcome. For every revelation, testimony
must announce that it is also the bearer of an ineradicable secret. It is perhaps
for this reason that the telling of secrets provided such a powerful dramaturgy
for the TRC. How else to explain the beguiling power of the perpetrators
hearings, in which the careful narration of abuse, torture, and assassination
fixated audiences to a greater degree than the accounts of disappearances,
loss, and suffering did at the victims hearings? One may speculate that the
perpetrators hearings permitted the illusory consolation that the secret
was being revealed, whereas in the victims hearings, the suffering was
already known or at least familiar to those who had endured it. And yet
no speech could ever be adequate to it for either the sufferers or those who
would attend their words. The TRC thus staged a split between testimony
as disclosure or reconciliation with the truth, on the one hand, and, as the
announcement of an infinite distance between truth and representation, on
the other. This split might be phrased in terms of the secret as something
to be told counterposed to that which one tells without revealing.
Now, the inadequacy of language to the event that is narrated in a trial
or a truth commission does not in any way inhibit its telling. But there are at
least two kinds of telling that arise from this inadequacy. One is the repetitive and compulsive telling that occurs in situations classified as trauma by
psychoanalysis, those situations in which stimuli have overwhelmed what
Freud, in a palpably material idiom, imagined as the protective shield of
the consciousness.13 The result, as we know, is a certain short-circuiting of
memory, such that the event cannot be contained in the past but demands
instead a re-presencing, one that ruptures the envelope of resistances that
would otherwise transform it into a trace structure.14 Memory does not
return to this past event; rather, the event returns again and again to the
present. Trauma, as such, is the failure of memory and the failure of representation. In the face of this excessive presence, which constantly threatens
the subject with the death of an eternal present, one can believe that the
taskof psychoanalysis and/or of the trialis the mastery, and hence the
displacement of the event in discourse and more specifically in the discourse
that is historicization. In such cases, narration would not so much recover
the past as it would effect a certain and indeed necessary temporal displacement, separating the subject and the event of his or her experience (and
accomplishing in the psyche what aesthetic judgment accomplishes for the
Kantian subject confronted by sublimity but in the idiom of the everyday
rather than art).
07/11/11 10:51 AM
i n t h e n a m e o f t r au m a
395
07/11/11 10:51 AM
396
C OM P A R A T I V E L I T E R A T U R E S T U D I E S
07/11/11 10:51 AM
i n t h e n a m e o f t r au m a
397
07/11/11 10:51 AM
398
C OM P A R A T I V E L I T E R A T U R E S T U D I E S
they illuminate the historical truth of apartheid. Here, the fictive works by
making the unbelievable actualities of apartheid believable to the reader
who would otherwise disavow them as too improbable.17 The irony is that
the fictive works in Country of My Skull by negating its status as other than
reality. Equally suspicious of fiction and truth, Krog anchors her text in a
verifiable archiveagainst which it is endlessly comparedthough she
maintains a gap between the author and the narrative persona. The I that
speaks is both transient and capable of being otherwise, and in this manner,
Krog both appropriates fiction for the project of (social) self-transformation
and contains it there.18
In Zo Wicombs Davids Story, by contrast, the exploration of an
historical event, the assassination of Dulcie September by members of the
liberation movement, becomes the occasion for a fiction obsessed with the
instrumentalization of truth in a movement that seeks freedom from racist
lies but that is contaminated by suspicion.19 In this case, fiction permits the
recognition of the impossibility of truth, and in this moment, the project of
literature too is called into question. Ivan Vladislavics descriptive fictions
work in a different mode, suspending narrative and emphasizing the seriality of daily existence, in which, nonetheless, the threat and anticipation of
a traumatic event haunts everyones consciousness. This possible event is
staged in terms of a future reading, a reading of the individual trauma as an
index and symptom of the social crises attending the end of apartheid but
expressing little faith in the possibility of a resolution achieved in the trial
scenario. Vladislavics narratives are largely set in Johannesburg and have
the quality of Kaf kaesque allegory, but their mise-en-scne is verily photographic in its capture of the materialities of contemporary South African
urban existence.20
In all of these works, one discerns an ambition to speculate on dimensions of the historical real that remain inaccessible to empiricism and that
exceed what might have been addressed if it had not been fully resolved either
in a formal legal context or in the pseudo-juridical theater of the TRC. It is
in this sense that these works inhabit that aporetic space between law and
lawfulness when it is triangulated by the question of justice. If Felman has
led us to expect literature to assume the burden of exploring what the trial
cannot achieve, South African writers extend this function to the investigation of what literature must do in the very absence of the trial, once it has
become an object of nostalgia or the figure of what might have been.
Two major alternatives to this conundrum have been elaborated
within South African literature: the first is the turn to the mythic and the
comic fabular; the second is the rejection of the confessional form of the
novel and the radicalization of the split between telling and revelation.
07/11/11 10:51 AM
i n t h e n a m e o f t r au m a
399
07/11/11 10:51 AM
400
C OM P A R A T I V E L I T E R A T U R E S T U D I E S
07/11/11 10:51 AM
i n t h e n a m e o f t r au m a
401
07/11/11 10:51 AM
402
C OM P A R A T I V E L I T E R A T U R E S T U D I E S
As Christians tells us, the only word reportedly spoken by Sila in the
admittedly incomplete transcript of her initial trial appears as an enigma.
Hertseer, translated as heartsore, is the word she is said to have offered
when asked why she committed the deed. But hertseer is an affect ambiguously attached to Silas killing of her son, the boy named Baro. It may be
either an antecedent (not necessarily a cause) or an effect of the act. And
by virtue of this ambiguity, it would be used by the states representatives
and Silas own advocate as evidence of quite different dispositions. For the
former, it marked the point at which her willfulness asserted itself, but
only because they read it as a refusal of the demand for revelation. In this
instance, the demand of the prosecutors was less for testimony than for
confession: the absolute transparency of a self in the trial. For her advocates,
however, the mysterious word heartsore constituted evidence of a state of
psychic woundedness appropriate to her abused position, and it functioned
as a placeholder for what might have been a disclosure of her otherwise
unspeakable history. In this case, transparency is what trauma forecloses. But
both sides subscribed to the fantasy of the trial as the place where secrets
are relinquished and where, in fact, none can be permitted to remain. In one
case, a will obstructs the opening to knowledge. In the other, an incapacity
of the will blocks the same route.
Christians quotes Derrida in claiming there can be no private archive
but adds that
this does not mean that the public and iterable differences in the
archive exhaust the particular knowledge and private experience to
which such utterances attest. There is something that can never be
made public in the case of Sila and Baro. And this insistent secret
cautions contemporary historians against appropriating Sila for the
cause of resistance and the history of Western subjects-in-the-making.
Deeply private, Baros death is the factor that will not permit Silas act
to translate itself into resistance, even though this act transgresses the
law. Sila and Baro alone have intimate knowledge of the act. And Baro
has a knowledge that exceeds even Silas. This, we can never read.24
There are two orders of the secret here: that which would be amenable to
empirical recording if technical media had been or could have been available and that which no technique of the empirical can ever access or translate. Death stands here as the mark of a radical unspeakability, the limit
of all possible voicings. This we expect from both a psychoanalytic and a
Kantian perspective. With regard to a Kantian understanding, the discourse
07/11/11 10:51 AM
i n t h e n a m e o f t r au m a
403
of the sublime as the exemplary form of the aesthetic (and every form of
romanticism emerging therefrom) assumes one can conceive of that which
cannot have an empirical presentation and that art can represent this aporetic
relationship in a manner that testifies to the limits of perception and the
grandeur of reason.25 Death is, of course, a classic theme of the sublime. But
in Christianss essay, life is equally unspeakable.
This insistence on the unspeakability of life marks Christianss texts
refusal of the confessional paradigma refusal that both underwrites and
challenges her fictional exploration of a character named Sila in the novel
Unconfessed. But beyond the fiction, and at the end of her historiographical
account of the archival project that informs her novel, Christians remarks on
the incomplete disappearance that being consigned to the archive ensures,
and writes of an
opacity behind which something moveslives of people, lives moving
against each other, away from each other, a woman washing linen, a
boy running to fetch lemons, complaining of pain, some bread, some
grease, a knife. And the presence of a woman called mistress of a house
some three hundred paces away. And, behind her, ox straps close at
hand, a man who is called master. A boy, dead. A woman consigned
to death. A history of living death.26
It is clear that history is giving way here or at least that the discourse of
history is giving way. In the poetic turn to things of everyday existence is
an intimation of fiction. It will be born of speculation at the point where
the opacity of the others existence, and not merely the opacity of death,
blocks the view.
It is not incidental that Christians gives her novel based on this archival research the title Unconfessed. For the novel is a complex refusal of the
confessional mode as the paradigm for biographical and characterological
fictiona mode that traces itself back to Augustine. It is also a refusal of
the ideological fiction by which the trial assumes the place of paradigm for
truth telling as revelation. At the heart of the novel is not merely the enigma
of the real-historical Silas nonresponse, measured in the abyss that opens
around the word hertseer, but the very impossibility of answering in ones
name to a system that has made the name the site of a permanent accusation
and not merely an interpellation.27 At one point, the character Sila asserts,
Meida rule lives in that and continues, Come hereanother law that
grows from Meid.28 After tracing the many violences that emanate from
this single appellation, including sexual violation, Sila remarks that I was
07/11/11 10:51 AM
404
C OM P A R A T I V E L I T E R A T U R E S T U D I E S
07/11/11 10:51 AM
i n t h e n a m e o f t r au m a
405
each other on how to care for the ailing matron: You tell, each says to the
other (33). In the end, Johannes was the one who decided to speak, but it
was too late (3233).
From the start, then, language is belated in relation to the event it
seeks to narrate. Moreover, telling and speaking are split, though the temporal rupture between event and narration is not exactly parallel to the split
between telling, which appears first in the present tense and in the imperative, and speaking, which occurs in the simple past tense and in a negative
form. Silas reverie recounting this moment is then interrupted by the more
recent memory of another slave woman who killed her children and was
strangled as punishment for her crime. And it is here, after the narrative
recollection of a moment in which telling has been conjoined to death
and death has been recounted in a narrative of blunt, almost mute brevity
(And then they threw her into the sea [33]), that the narrator, Sila, enters
the scene. Get out of my way, she announces. And we are in the space
of a narrative that will not terminate so much as stop, before being closed
by a speculative second-person voicing that addresses the readers desire to
know: You want to know. What happened to her? (341). Again, temporal
instability is linked to the demand for narration. The wanting to know and
the narration remain hostage to the present; the event recedes into the abyss
of pastness and unknowability. But temporal instability also leaks forward.
Because of the full stop that separates the two clauses, we are unsure of the
referent in that seductive question, What happened to her? Does this
refer to that which preceded the events of the novel or that which exceeds
its narrative? Or does it refer to those events still to come, in the aftermath
of the narratives closure?
It might be tempting to read the first-person narrative that dominates
Unconfessed as an effort to reclaim that fullness of presence that history
not only denies (as it denies all such presence) but multiplies in a structure
Christians elsewhere describes as Silas triple jeopardy: woman, black, slave.
Each of these terms marks the point of blockage in the possible access to
self-representation. And it is thus possible to read the novel as an effort at
positive reclamation, of speaking for and from the place of muting. But such
a reading would be mere wish fulfillment for the reader and is not sustained
by a careful examination of the text. For the novel is not a compensatory
filling in of the spaces that the structures of exclusion have produced. We
must not mistake the fiction as a speaking for; it is rather a speaking in
the absence of any fixed place from which utterance could claim to be
grounded in identity. The Sila of Unconfessed is an entirely unreliable narrator whose broken, recursive, and often contradictory discourse evades the
07/11/11 10:51 AM
406
C OM P A R A T I V E L I T E R A T U R E S T U D I E S
desire for unity at every turn. She mocks any identificatory aspiration that
might be imputed to the author, and she does so by virtue of the authors
careful tangling of the textual weave. Silas speech stutters, loops back, and
repeats itself in moments that veer between delusion and absolute lucidity.
She is infantile, sagacious, petulant, envious, and compassionate by turns.
Sometimes generous, sometimes covetous, she can be viciously sarcastic and
remarkably sensitive. She loves one of the women on the island, Lys, but is
envious of the other (Mina) and stoops to vindictive fantasy more than she
embraces solidarity in femininity. And although she admits to killing Baro,
this admission is not a confession.
For the most part, the novel is narrated as a series of internal addresses to
other characters, including an address to the dead son, Baro. With respect to
the address to her son, Silas discourse constitutes something like a maternal
pedagogy. But because Baro knows, as no other character can know, what
Sila has done, Baro does not have to and does not receive a confession.
The novel does not in any way constitute a baring of the soul for the reader
who would know what caused Sila to do what she did. For, despite the
admission, Sila also lies. Sometimes she knows she is lying. Sometimes she
wonders about her own capacities for recall. And sometimes the narrative
exposes her as ignorant of her own mendacity. What Sila offers Baro instead
of confession is an account of the life that he was too young to know and
that he is now not present to observefrom the very limited perspective
that is Silas. But this recounting is not a giving of account, either. There
is no final commensuration of deed and consequence. Too much exceeds
what can be told.
To the extent that Sila is a character whose admission of having killed
a son remains discontinuous from the confessional form (Sila ridicules
the pastor and is almost mute in the face of the court that inquires into
her sons death), the novel begs to be read as a repudiation of that paradigm so well described by Felman in which the revelation of the secret
and the telling without revealing are conflated. Sila tells but she does not
reveal. The character of Sila in Unconfessed exceeds both the archive and
the fantasy of transparency that underpins the confessional novel, and
this is achieved at least partly through the play with naming that recurs
throughout the novel.
What makes the novel so illustrative of the dilemmas confronting South
African literary production, including the fraught demands for and disappointments in the possibility of law, lawfulness, and justice, is the degree
to which the character whose would-be owners seek to evade the law by
misnaming and renaming her nonetheless remains beholden to the fantasy
of the proper name and the belief that truth consists in the convergence of
07/11/11 10:51 AM
i n t h e n a m e o f t r au m a
407
name and thing. In this manner, she enacts the desire forlawwhile provoking
a recognition of its absence. And she does so because her continued existence
is a doubled indictment of the trials failureits failure to deliver its own
law even though that would have required her death and its failure to
deliver the justice that would have negated the conditions that made her
the bearer of death. Trapped in the ineradicable double bind of needing
law and being its victim, she is relentless in trying to expose the process
by which her owner-turned-benefactors heir has swindled her out of her
freedom by renaming her and thus depriving her of what Oumieseiss will
granted. Yet even as she succumbs to the recognition that a proper naming
will elude her and that every naming is itself a doubling and a splitting of
the thingthe original simulation and dissimulation rather than the still
point of identityshe takes recourse in the law as an institution that could
remedy the violence of misnaming. Returning again and again in memory
to the will and testament in which her freedom was granted, Sila knows that
the document is both a lie and a promise, but her knowledge of its duplicity
does not let her relinquish her hope for freedom.
At the end of the novel, Sila sings out, Fetch me a bag of names.
Scatter them all over this island. I want those names to grow and flower so
that I may remember them (337). Her fathers name, she says, is the most
fragile here. She asks that her mother be given her real name, and she
disavows her own reduction to a place-name, namely de Kaap/the Cape.
Can a place beyour mother and your father? she asks (337). The fragility
of the patronymic is perhaps odd in the land of patriarchal law, but insofar
as colonialism is invariably the subordination of one patriarchy to another,
this vulnerability is perhaps inevitable. More telling is the characters longing
for the plenitude of orality, for it is in writing, she saysin an improbable
echo of Claude Lvi-Straussthat colonial power performs its effacement
of the truth in naming. They make me sick, she says. And now that
sickness has a name. It is forgetting. It is their contagion. They writethe
sound of rats in the grainthey want to put down their fathers name,
their mothers, and their fathers fathers and mothers mothers (33738).
They have names because they have property; it is a matter of inheritance,
of enabling the transmission of property between generations. But Sila is
property, and the mark of her being property is the interruption of another
prior system of naming in which she would not be the origin of her name
but in which she could identify with that other origin. She has lived the
violent consequence of this naming and so, after all, she avows, I, Sila van
den Kaap, I dare to say things that confuse me in a language that has been
given me and which strangles all other language, even the language in which
my own name lived (339).
07/11/11 10:51 AM
408
C OM P A R A T I V E L I T E R A T U R E S T U D I E S
I, Sila van den Kaap. The words sound as though they might be
addressed to a trial. When Sila recounts the event of Baros death toward
the novels end, she cannot separate the narration of the event from the
narration of the trial:
I will say this. That day. . .. That day before they welcomed the birth
of their lord. The house was hot with cooking and I was tired of it
all. Baro came to our hut with bruises. And I, a grown woman, knew
what it was to have bruises and how they hurt. He, being a boy, had
bruises the same size as mine. I asked, what will the next day bring?
What will the years bring? . . . I was heartsore.
That is what I told them in the landdrosts court. I was heartsore.
The rest they must tell themselves. They are good at telling the world
what it must think of itself. (269)
While speaking these lines to Lys, a woman imprisoned with her on Robben
Island, she is suddenly struck by her incapacity to tell the story or the possibility that Lys may find it unconvincing. I fear there are things I have
tried to say without success, because I have a sense of more than can be said,
much more (269). Sila has killed the only child whose name she chose (118),
the only one in whom her fathers name resounds (the name actually derives
from an ethnonym from the area of Mozambique whence the historical
Silamay have been taken as a child). She does so on the basis of a terrifying
and melancholy anticipation, whose structure is that of identification. Baro,
who bears her fathers memory in his name, is like her but too young to be
like her. There is a sense, then, in which Sila kills both her father and her son
in this momentand it is this awful forgetting of both past and future that
she will lay at the feet of the colonizers, whose first violence is the abduction
of others from their own language, their own world of things and names.
In this sense, Silas discourse constitutes another, compensatory, trial, one
in which the agents of coloniality and slavery stand accused. But there are
many in the dock. The relative lack of critical attention to slavery in South
Africa, where apartheid has been the primary object of critical historical and
political analysis, is brought under scrutiny by the novel in the very object
of its narrative. And the many complicities between patriarchies (including,
even, those between slaving and enslaved men) are subject to interrogation in
the novel. Silas accumulating indictments of the many institutions in which
law has functioned as the rule of lies opens onto the question of whether
law can ever be conceived beyond the repetition compulsions that emanate
from a concept of law as originating in primal violence.
07/11/11 10:51 AM
i n t h e n a m e o f t r au m a
409
07/11/11 10:51 AM
410
C OM P A R A T I V E L I T E R A T U R E S T U D I E S
thelaw of the father in every sense. Hence, Sila and Lys are constantly under
threat from the male prisoners as well as the male wardens. Nonetheless, in
the caring intimacy by which the women attempt to negotiate their awkward
relation to language and by which they attempt to escape the order of the
penal (sometimes forming bonds with other male prisoners), the novel turns
toward the possibility that there could be a sociality, a dialectic of recognition, beyond what Derrida would call phallogocentrism and beyond that
conflation of all law with the law of the father.
The move beyond such a conflation requires that sacrificial value be
relinquished, and it engenders a space from which the heroic has been
banished. In other words, the world in which the trial promises and fails
to deliver closure is without tragedy. The speaking that occurs on its stage
must therefore risk meaninglessness. Indeed, if Unconfessed is postsacrificial,
it is also, in Walter Benjamins sense, post-tragedian. As Elizabeth Stewart
reminds us, Benjamin (like Nietzsche, as well as Horkheimer and Adorno)
saw the end of tragedy in the moment that Socrates offered irony and garrulousness in the face of his own sacrifice, mocking the heroic impulse to
demonstrate indifference to the fates with silence: Socrates dies a sacrificial
death but whereas the tragic hero had endowed the community with the
word that broke the spell of myth silently, Socrates talks and talks, thereby
subverting tragic language.29 As Stewart notes, the chaotic entanglements
expressed in Socrates tireless speaking are associated with the destabilization
of the unities of place and time, iconicized as the court and the trial. There is
something analogous occurring in Christianss fictional rewriting of the story
of Sila, insofar as she gives to Sila a loquacity to match what Stewart refers to
as Socratess garrulousness. This loquacity is also destabilizingnot only of
the claims made by the court but also of the institutional status of narrative
fiction and of the readers own relationship to his or desire for revelation.
Benjamins ambivalent melancholy at the loss of the tragic (which is
also, nonetheless, liberation from the delusion that reduced human society
to groups of individuals) generalizes itself in a vision of the fallenness of
humans to the status of the merely creaturely. A symptom of that creaturely
existence, in which humans are bereft of the possibility of communicating
directly with God, is, for Benjamin, the act of naming by which humans communicate to themselves their capacity to communicatea capacity absolutely
essential to them but restricted to a narcissistic circle. The loss is not merely
alienation from God but also alienation from all the other forms of language
in which other entities, and especially natural ones, also communicate their
being. When this occurs, says Benjamin, naming becomes overnaming,
a vacuous process of designation marked by an irrevocable chasm between
07/11/11 10:51 AM
i n t h e n a m e o f t r au m a
411
07/11/11 10:51 AM
412
C OM P A R A T I V E L I T E R A T U R E S T U D I E S
some of its members to each other in jealous solidarity. These deprive the
black woman slave in particular of the powers of communicationnot only
in relation to an absolute yet lost communicativity but in relation to that
which is granted to otherseven slave men in exile from their places of
origin. Yet Sila shares in Benjamins sense of a corruption and a violence
that works precisely in and through naming, especially that kind of designating naming associated with the transformation of people into property.
This is categorical typing as namingthe kind that addresses someone
only as meid. It is perhaps the most violent of all overnamings, a sense that
is well conveyed in the English translation of Benjamins German, for the
English phrase also carries the connotation of overwriting. In the registers
of slavery, as in Silas life, overnaming becomes visible as overwriting: the
overwriting of previous names, the overwriting of freedom, the overwriting
of a will and testament by anothers will. Overwriting as overnaming marks
the point of truths effacement, and it becomes Silas task to insist on the
traces of that which has been put under erasure. This is another reason for
her being haunted: Baros specter merely redoubles this relentless predicament and gives it its figural form. It is from here that she dreams and from
here that her dreams can do the work of disclosing what has otherwise been
repressed, namely the violence of a legal order that has made the trial the
scene of languages evacuation and that has made truth a question of mere
conformity to the (unjust) law.
The trial recounted in one of (the fictional) Silas elliptical reveries begins
with a question: The landdrost said, Is it true that on the twenty-fourth
of December last . . . (231). Sila answers, What could I say that would be
answer enough for us all? And she continues, I told myself, Sila you must
let them know what it means to be Sila registered to Van der Watt(232).
But she cannot answer, not even in the moment that they say Speak . . .
Speak, Sila van den Kaap, you have committed a heinous crime (233). In the
stuttering recitation of the inquiry, Sila speaks to Lys, her most attentive
auditor, saying They wanted to know about that last moment my boy was
of this world. But not if he suffered. They said, let it be noted that, in her
insolence, the accused refused to answer a single question. (233). In this
scene, muting becomes refusal, and the colonial orders responsibility for
silencing is converted into an accusation against the nonresponding woman.
Sila is then catapulted back in time, to the moment when the field cornet
conducted his first investigation. Shocked, he asks Meid, wat . . . wat het
jy gedoen (234) [Maid, what . . . what have you done?]. As these words
return to Sila, the natural world erupts in her memory and pushes the story
of the killing aside.
07/11/11 10:51 AM
i n t h e n a m e o f t r au m a
413
07/11/11 10:51 AM
414
C OM P A R A T I V E L I T E R A T U R E S T U D I E S
07/11/11 10:51 AM
i n t h e n a m e o f t r au m a
415
resemblances. This is Silas other lesson: that the historical world stretches
out in the communicative relations between individuals who will never know
each other but to whom they might yet be responsible.
Columbia University
Notes
1. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008),67.
2. Eliot, Middlemarch, 67.
3. Plato, Minos, trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1963),386.
4. Plato, Minos, 386.
5. Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2002), 8.
6. Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 56.
7. These techniques included differential pedagogy, in which knowledge was disseminated
to some populations for some purposes and not to others, as well as elaborate systems of censorship in both the public and popular cultural spheres and official disinformation and governmental cover-ups of counterinsurgency activities, including cross-border military activities in
Mozambique and Angola. A particularly useful recent history of censorship in South Africa can
be found in Peter McDonalds The Literature Police (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
8. On this issue, see Mahmood Mamdani, Amnesty or Impunity? A Preliminary Critique
of the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRC), diacritics
32.34 (2002): 3359.
9. Rosalind C. Morris, The Mute and the Unspeakable: Political Subjectivity, Violent
Crime, and the Sexual Thing in a South African Mining Community, in Law and Disorder in
the Postcolony, ed. Jean and John Comaroff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 57101.
10. Jacques Derrida, The Strange Institution Called Literature: An Interview with Jacques
Derrida, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3375.
11. Jane Taylor, Ubu and the Truth Commission (Cape Town: University of Cape Town
Press, 1998).
12. Fiona Ross, Bearing Witness: Women and the South African TRC (London: Pluto Press,
2003).
13. I am here paraphrasing the arguments made by Freud in his writings about trauma, first
in the essay on the war neuroses, and then, more complexly, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
See Introduction to Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses, in An Infantile Neurosis and Other
Works, vol. 17 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953), 20516, and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, vol. 18 of The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 164.
14. This structure is elegantly described in Freuds essay, Note Upon the Mystic WritingPad, in The Ego and the Id and Other Works, vol. 19 of The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 22532.
15. This relationship is an unstable one, however, for the museum is an institution constantly
subject to reencompassment by the aesthetic. This tendency is best exemplified in South
Africa by the repeated and accelerating displacement of history by heritage as the idiom in
which to conceive of relations to the past. The latter is no doubt motivated by an aspiration to
recognize the persisting effect and future opportunities immanent in the past as well as more
porous conceptions of the relationships between different temporal orders. It is nonetheless
07/11/11 10:51 AM
416
C OM P A R A T I V E L I T E R A T U R E S T U D I E S
inseparable from the generalization of commodity aesthetics and from the regime of property,
including intellectual and intangible property.
16. Jacques Derrida, Passions, in On the Name, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey Jr., and
Ian McLeod (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 27.
17. Krog speaks about the status of the fictional in her writing in the interview with Duncan
Brown, entitled Creative Non-Fiction: A Conversation, Current Writing: Text and Reception
in Southern Africa 23.1 (2011): 5770. Her position should not be confused with a rejection of
literature; in particular, she credits J. M. Coetzee with sparking more critical reflection on South
African reality than the author of any nonfiction. But the purpose of the fiction remains the
transformation of the social real, and she is suspicious of the desire for aesthetic autonomy. What
she is most critical of, however, is the failure, within literature, to grasp and communicate the
complexity of lived experience. It is the reductionism of fiction to single or limited narratives
that constitutes for her the greatest source of untruth.
18. Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull ( Johannesburg: Random House, 1998).
19. Zo Wicomb, Davids Story (New York: Feminist Press, 2001).
20. See, for example, Ivan Vladislavic, Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked
(London: Portabello, 2006), and The Restless Supermarket (Cape Town: David Philip, 2001).
21. Duncan Brown and Antjie Krog, Creative Non-Fiction, 67.
22. On the archive as a repository for the encounter with power rather than evidence of
subjectivity see Michel Foucault, The Lives of Infamous Men, trans. Robert Hurley, in
Power, vol. 3 of Essential Works of Foucault, 19541984, ed. James Faubion (New York: New
Press, 2000), 15775.
23. Yvette Christians, Heartsore: The Melancholy Archive of Cape Colony Slavery, The
Scholar and the Feminist Online 7. 2 (2009), http://barnard.edu/sfonline/africana/christianse_01.
htm (accessed 27 September 27).
24. Christians, Heartsore. The Derrida text to which she refers is Archive Fever. It
may be useful to note, with Christians, that in contemplating the TRC, Derrida equated
the gathering of victims testimonies with archiving or, more specifically, the problem of the
archive. See Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 48.
25. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), esp. 12859.
26. Christians, Heartsore.
27. In Heartsore, Christians speaks at length of the difficulty of translating hertseer as
heartsore and suggests that much is lost in translation. Indeed, this movement in translation is part of the predicament to which Sila was herself subject, her trial having taken place
as the British colonial regime was coming to bear on and displace the Dutch legal code of
the corporate colonialism that had previously been administered by the East India Company.
28. Yvette Christians, Unconfessed (New York: Other Press, 2006), 139. Hereafter cited by
page number.
29. Elizabeth Stewart, Catastrophe and Survival: Walter Benjamin and Psychoanalysis (New
York: Continuum, 2009), 2223.
30. Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London: Routledge, 1998),
1920.
31. Walter Benjamin, On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, in vol. 1 of
Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 19131926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 72.
07/11/11 10:51 AM