Abstract
If trauma theory has emerged as a key paradigm for attending to an ever-expanding list of historical events,1 this is something it shares with melancholia, its theoretical counterpart.2 It is not simply that trauma and melancholia are both pathological responses to loss, but also that they are, at times, strategically deployed across the humanities as ethical markers of remembrance. Following on from the widespread academic rejection of mourning as a mode of forgetting,3 melancholia has been depathologised and mobilised as a memorial model that safeguards the memory of the lost other. Similarly, certain somatic manifestations of trauma are valorised precisely because they disavow teleological forms of ‘working through’ that might lead to the relinquishing of the past or, at the very least, the partial containment of the traumatic condition. Relatedly, recent theories of spectrality, inspired in large part by Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993), figure the ghostly lost object as a haunting presence that disavows historical amnesia.4 In the field of literary analysis, narratological manifestations of the traumatic condition are regarded as ethical markers inasmuch as they resist the narrative closure that might signal the betrayal of the past and its victims. Yet the recent postcolonial novels of Algerian author Assia Djebar have begun to proffer a challenge to the notion that such tropes are inherently ethical.
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Notes
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Assia Djebar, Le Blanc de l’Algérie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), 233. In Algerian White the term ‘autodéfense’ is rendered as ‘a way to defend myself’ (219).
Nicole Aas-Rouxparis, ‘La Femme-oiseau de la mosaïque: Image et chant dans La Femme sans sépulture d’Assia Djebar’, Nouvelles Etudes Francophones, 19 (2004), 97–108 (97). My translation.
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© 2015 Lucy Brisley
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Brisley, L. (2015). Trauma Theory, Melancholia and the Postcolonial Novel: Assia Djebar’s Algerian White/Le Blanc de l’Algérie . In: Ward, A. (eds) Postcolonial Traumas. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137526434_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137526434_7
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