University of Amsterdam MA Comparative Literature 13 June 2017
Master’s Thesis
Supervised by dr. Irina Souch Second reader dr. Marija Cetinic
Extraordinary Events, Ordinary Lives?
Re-tracing the Structures of Sexual
Vio-lence in Myriam Gurba’s Mean
Merel Haenen Student number: 10900284
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 3
INTRODUCTION 4
CHAPTER 1. DE-EVENTILIZING TRAUMA THROUGH AFFECTIVE ATTUNEMENT 8 1.1 An Open-Ended Present: Affect and the Production of Potentialities 9 1.2 Ending an Open-End? Reconciling Potentiality with the Disruption of Trauma 13 CHAPTER 2. TESTING THE TESTIMONY: FROM REPRESENTATION TO CONVERSATION 23 2.1 Stories (Un) Told: Representation and Persuasion 25 2.2: “Some Parts Feel Too Personal For the Historical Record”: Testifying Affective Weight
31 CHAPTER 3. VIOLENCE LIVED, STRUCTURES UNDONE 40 3.1 Registering Resignation: “What Are You Doing?” 41 3.2 Enduring Sexual Violence: Living Amidst the Inevitable 48
CONCLUSION 53
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am infinitely indebted to the wonderful people who kept me motivated, inspired and stand-ing through this writstand-ing process. To my mom, for always pickstand-ing me back up. To my dad, for making me laugh when most necessary. To my friends, for being my breath of fresh air. To Irina, for your vital assistance and for sharing with me your sincere understanding of the in-justices I write on.
INTRODUCTION
Like you I am not fine Like you
Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life
Myriam Gurba is the woman who lived. The woman who lives on, that is, in the thick of sexual violence. After surviving the heinous sexual assault of a stranger in the 1990s, Gurba has since been coming to terms that the girl who “gets to live” is also the girl whose job it is to tell the story (Gurba 111). And so, she bravely takes up a trope that Hollywood film theorists would call “the final girl” (Gurba 111). The non-fiction novel Mean is her story. The story is at once a highly personalized attestation to the sexual violence Gurba has had to endure but also, as I will argue towards in this thesis, a necessary approximation towards a larger culture that conditions and normalizes this violence: a culture where there is a trope for women who have happened to survive a seemingly inevitable violence.
Before I elucidate the intention of my thesis further, it is important to note that both my project and Mean – released in November of 2017 – stand in the wake of the worldwide #MeToo movement. Emerging from the “whisper networks” of Hollywood, as the hushed warnings and cautionary tales shared between women on who to avoid within their relevant network, the movement exponentially expanded in providing a platform across countless me-dia outlets for those whispered warnings to be yelled out loud (Creswell and Hsu). The sheer scope of the movement is, for example, demonstrated in the enormous supply of allegations that came to light against now in-famous figures such as producer Harvey Weinstein. The allegations against Weinstein multiplied as if in a chain reaction, once women started to tenta-tively testify against his misconducts, the more women gathered up the courage to expose their own experiences. In October 2017 alone, a New York Times article reported that the allegations against Weinstein had come out by the dozens; with actresses such as Lupita
Nyong’O, Rose McGowan and Ashley Judd amongst those who bore witness against him (Kantor and Twohey). Dozens of women spoke out against the insidious manner in which he harassed them, testifying against forms of violence that had often remained opaque and un-spoken of for years. By the end of 2017, hundreds of other renowned men had been accused of misconduct (Creswell and Hsu). To boot, the “Weinstein effect” not only triggered the ex-posure of the misconduct of other public figures, but also infiltrated companies, campuses, and institutions alike (Grigoriadis).
Nevertheless, despite all the red lines drawn and feet put down in the media, the #Me-Too movement is presently dissipating from the public eye - its flood ebbing again. Yet I con-sider #MeToo memorable for not only breaking an unspoken vow of silence on a colossal scale, but for its capacity to have created an unspoken connection between women worldwide. Not only was formerly muted sexual misconduct amplified in the media, for many women a detailed description of suffered injustices was not required to participate in the movement. If anything, women were allowed – anonymously and privately – a safe space where they could utter the two significant words and mean them too, as if to finally admit: “like you, I am not fine, like you” (Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life 63). Without having to speak of them exces-sively women were able to sense the wrongdoings of a world where violence is too often ex-plained away; wrongs that are not allowed to be felt in the first place. That, in itself, is a radi-cal act.
The #MeToo movement did not just break silence on singular traumatic instances, but pierced stillness with the “thud, thud, thud” of a violence that is all-pervasive (Ahmed, Living
a Feminist Life 60). And although, similar to the many stories that came to the fore in the
#MeToo movement, Mean is but one woman’s testimony standing on its own, I will asses the text not as testifying to the sexual violence that creeps into her world but a world. Along these lines, I will contend that the trauma of sexual violence cannot be located within a culture by
merely shedding light on singular occurrences of it. Instead I will approach Gurba’s docu-mented trauma affectively in order to understand it, first and foremost, as a felt reality. There-upon I will attempt to demonstrate how Mean presents this felt reality as the default embed-dedness of (unwilling) participants in a world that accords violence.
To a certain extent, this research follows in the footsteps of recent developments in the field literary and cultural theory extending across, at least, the last two decades. These devel-opments have been comprehensively addressed as an “affective turn”; a turn that marked a renewed and transdisciplinary investment in the study of bodies, emotions, feeling, or just bare sensations and visceral tensions as viable objects of academic inquiry (Cvetkovich 3). Once a “turn” and now a field on its own, it incorporates contributions from scholars who have, not without internal contradictions, studied affect as a separate category and examined the ends towards which the category can be wielded. I would argue that a renewed engage-ment with affect is not unique to the last two decades, as it has also been at the center of fem-inist debates that date back to, at least, efforts of second-wave femfem-inists who sought to re-think the personal as political. In my research I hope to offer a nuanced contribution to a shared endeavor held by feminist and affect theorists alike: namely to study the manner in which power circulates through affect and, for that reason, assess highly personal affective states as politically salient ways of being (Pedwell and Whitehead 16).
On that note, the first chapter will embark upon a journey through Myriam Gurba’s historical present. The historical present - a concept that I borrow from Lauren Berlant and will further elucidate in the first chapter – being a site where individuals are constantly nego-tiating their sustenance or embeddedness in the world by responding to affective forces. In studying the fragmented and internally open-ended form of Gurba’s memoir, I will trace how Gurba writes herself into existence through a renewable present, instead of a personal history. From there, I will attempt to accommodate the intervention of her trauma, supposedly the
vio-lent disruption of one’s life story, in the memoir. In close reading specific scenes I will argue against an event-based model of trauma as a singular and exceptional breach of the self-evident and work towards an understanding of crisis as an ongoing factor that Gurba affec-tively integrates herself to. Given that the first chapter will confer that trauma does not mani-fest itself in an enclosed event, the second chapter will deliberate how Gurba’s text means to testify to trauma. In this chapter I will provide a comparative reading between, on the one hand, Gurba’s reconstruction of her own assault and, conversely, the stories of crimes com-mitted against other women that occupy the text. In comparing the often-abundant infor-mation and detail that accompanies the latter stories and the enigmatic tendencies shaping the former, I will argue that Gurba deliberately employs this discrepancy to comment on whether a representation of trauma holds up rhetorically. In doing so, I will argue that Gurba’s testi-mony indulges in what is expected from her testitesti-mony in the first place. In frustrating the ge-neric expectations from her audience, this chapter will evaluate how Gurba disregards re-creating the scene of her traumatic incident for the sake of conveying a sense of an ongoing affective crisis. Finally, in the third chapter I argue that in navigating tensions between repre-sentation and response, Mean concurrently conveys a sense of suspended catharsis that has the allegorical potential to register the conflation of Gurba’s trauma back into the ordinary. I will study how violence not only affects subjects, but is also inhabited. The third chapter will serve as the final assessment into how Gurba lives on in the midst of violence. It will show how a crisis-intensified present becomes intricately underwhelmed, trivialized and banalized across a culture where structural violence is deemed to go hand in hand with personal resigna-tion to it. All in all, the final chapter will indicate how Gurba’s Mean makes a claim on how a, by then de-exceptionalized, trauma comes to serve as the default and dominant idiom to a collectively lived reality.
CHAPTER 1. DE-EVENTILIZING TRAUMA THROUGH AFFECTIVE ATTUNEMENT
The ordinary is as much an accident as the extraordinary.
Lynne Tillman, Men and Apparitions
Myriam Gurba’s memoir Mean presents a series of non sequitur narrative fragments loosely combined as a coming-of-age tale. The sections function as playful and often arbitrary accounts of Gurba’s embeddedness in the everyday; as she comments on and recounts her strolls to the pencil sharpener in kindergarten, a college roommate plucking her eyebrows, or overheard conversations in donut shops from an intimate first-person perspective. In the midst of the textual fragments elaborating on Gurba’s mostly quotidian modes of being, however, Gurba also writes up the distressing disruption of these when she recounts the rape she suf-fered as a young woman. This chapter explores how Gurba accommodates this violent depar-ture from an otherwise familiar and accustomed everyday. In so doing, I will not approach Gurba’s memoir as a comprehensive account of her coming-into-being, or trace how the dis-ruption of a trauma would have to trigger a radically different trajectory. Instead, I aim to evaluate how Gurba’s embeddedness into a historical present – a term I adopt from the work of Lauren Berlant - reconfigures an understanding of how Gurba’s affectively responds and adjusts to a crisis. In doing so, the following chapter will undertake at re-visiting the manner in which trauma theory has primarily monopolized the understanding of a crisis-intensified present. In particular, I will critique Cathy Caruth’s acclaimed articulation of the traumatic narrative, where a catastrophic and traumatic event is assumed to be singularly disruptive in its unexpected occurrence. I will also point out that the Caruthian trauma-model assumes that, after the advent of the traumatic event, a subject’s being becomes over determined by trauma through the inherent “belated impact” it has on a life. I will argue that what the concept of belatedness overlooks is the possibility of having the crisis itself, as opposed to its belated
recurrence, recur. On that note, by studying how disparate scenes of Gurba’s affectively charged historical present accustom to a “psychologically seismic” traumatic impacts, I will argue for an understanding of crisis as a prolonged condition. In providing a close reading of the exemplary textual fragments, that represent how Gurba affectively attunes herself in a “pre”- and “post”-traumatic present, I aim to work towards an alternative conceptualization of crisis not as singularly shattering but as carrying ongoing and systemic calibrations.
1.1 An Open-Ended Present: Affect and the Production of Potentialities
Gurba does not care for interpreting her own life story by chronicling a series of land-marks or noteworthy events. In writing herself into existence, she is not just retrospectively curating conventional milestones – such as first kisses or career promotions - into a personal history accordingly. Instead, she makes her imprint on the world noteworthy by re-living it in her writing. Her memoir becomes the site where her embeddedness into the world is by no means fixed, as she constantly re-writes herself noting, reflecting and adjusting to different external environments. I argue that Gurba re-writes herself into an elongated now: the histori-cal present. I will begin this section by further elucidating the concept of the historihistori-cal present and demonstrate how affect serves as its primary modality that shapes it into a site of ever-emergent and ever-gathering potentiality.
In the second chapter to her oft-cited publication in the field of affect theory, Cruel
Optimism, Lauren Berlant gathers up the theoretical ingredients needed towards a better
un-derstanding of the historical present (53). Her use of the term is implicated in an interplay between the generalizable and the singular; the former referring to a subject’s irreducible (his-torical) specificity and individual biography and the latter involving the acute mediators by which people respond “to the world’s disheveled but predictable dynamics” (Berlant 53). To
live in a historical present, is to be submerged into a stretched-out present framed and appre-hended by the subject’s capacity for intuition within it. This intuition is the point where “af-fect meets history”, whereby Berlant accredits the more visceral processes that work towards a reliable sense of life (52). Accordingly, Berlant construes the scene of the historical present as constantly under construction at the hand of the affective forces shifting across atmos-pheres, catching up to and responding to urgencies (63). Evidently, the historical present as such is linked foundationally to the immanent capacity of affect. In order to further flesh out the formula for the historical present in which affect acts as a variable, I now aim to examine the affect as a separate concept. The concept has often been displaced from a cognition-centered argument in order to establish a friction and discordance between emotive and affec-tive codifications. Affect theorist Brian Massumi, for instance, follows a dialectical form of reasoning whereby his framework for viewing affect is defined in disjunction to emotional states. A primary distinction on which this dialectic relies, is the premise that while both ex-periences function as bodily exex-periences; generic emotions carry the capacity for signification whereas affect acts as an a-signifying force of intensity or potentiality. In other words, affects serve as the forces passing between bodies that operate beyond a cognitive domain; affects mark a subject’s immersion in a world of unquantifiable encounters and intensities. Converse-ly, emotions operate conform to a clear “subjective content”; they are fixed by socio-linguistic signification that render the experience “recognizable” (Massumi, “Autonomy” 88). What this means to say, is that emotions offer ready-made syntheses mediating and morphing arbitrary intensities and experiences into pre-packaged deals. Affect, on the other hand, by resisting such “signification, intention and mediation” consequently offers potentialities against, what Massumi would argue to be, the fictions of stability embedded in emotions (Vermeulen 8). Accordingly, affect has often been granted more of a privileged critical engagement within the realm ontology that centers how corporeal processes feel out modes of being in the world.
Ontologies that are always in formation rely upon affective compositions. In turn; fixed and epistemic modes of understanding the world are more affiliated to emotional experiences1. The inner logic and nuances implicated within these dialectics show how affect comes to oc-cupy the wavering spaces “arising in the midst of in-between-ness” (Seigworth and Gregg 1). Affects emerge from a constant mobility and defy a particular point of origin and are, there-fore, implicated in the movement of and among different bodies. Thus, I would refine affect as a concept that is self-propelling and accommodated by an inherent “open-ended in-between-ness” (Seigworth and Gregg 3; emphasis added). Finally, then, considering that the formation of the historical present is contingent upon a subject’s continuous visceral attune-ment to affects; it can be conceptualized as a site with constant open-ended potential (Berlant 69).
It is along the line of the inexhaustibility to affective attunement that the reader is wel-comed in the Gurba’s world. It is officially an autobiography, only regular biographical
ele-ments are consciously de-canonized. While throughout her memoir Gurba relates years of her
life within singular sentences – “I worked reading books to the blind (…) I got a job teaching history” – she also produces pages particularizing minutes (162). But by consciously eluding biographical ingredients Gurba does not remain an enigmatic “character” to the reader. In-stead, Gurba shifts focus from merely unraveling a personal archive to re-counting her movement in and through that archive. The reader is brought closer to Gurba by gradually acquiring an affinity to her composure in viscerally dense experiences. Thus, the memoir falls short of factual information while there is a multiplicity of scenes in which Gurba is portrayed sensing, responding to and absorbing witnessed activity. For that reason, Gurba also demon-strates a definite awareness of the aspired literary form she can allow her memoir to accumu-late into, intermittently interrupting her writing with phrases such as “I could tell you about
(…) but I’m not going to ”, “this is not a coming-out story” or other declarative remarks by which she shows her work to be conscientiously filtered. While filtering the form of the memoir, her writing is simultaneously unapologetic in that the episodic textual fragments of-fer immersive and sensual experiences into the settings of her everyday – childhood neigh-borhoods, college dorms, supermarkets, a pretzelry, history classes, and so on. The fragments – encased and sealed off with individual titles – unravel along a subtle chronology and gener-ally function according to a familiar inner formula. That is, Gurba’s sharp opening sentences are delivered to the reader in an unannounced and unanticipated fashion, always with a defi-nite generative potential. She, for example, conjures up the aforementioned settings with sug-gestive phrases such as “I shared my room with two girls of color” (86) or “I didn’t know the new roommate had undiagnosed narcolepsy” (96). While such sentences usually open Gurba’s episode on ambiguous terms, the conclusive sentences equally do so; with the final corresponding final remarks to these examples being, in equal order: “I stared at the ceiling and pondered my ‘C’. I C therefore I am” (89) and “I glanced at Sydney. I glanced at the but-ton on her lapel. The butbut-ton said, ‘Verklempt’” (96). In that sense, due to the formulaic open-endedness to the episodes the memoir carries on as if in a loop, rendering each fragment dis-tinct but not exceptional. The fragments assume a renewable position as in each one Gurba attunes – freely and abundantly – to the visceral forces and stimuli floating through her pre-sent. That said, Gurba also seems to provide a foreshadowing to the effect the immersive, non sequitur fragments are meant to give. On the very first page, she writes:
Let’s become a spot upon which fateful moonlight shines. Let’s become that night.
Let’s absorb and drip.
(…) We open our eyes. We allow them to adjust to the place and things described (1).
In the use of the imperative “let’s” she implies a synchronicity between her and her reader, after which she then proceeds to urge for a sensual alignment – to register, to “absorb” – with the atmosphere that is being written into existence. As a result, the final two lines show the narrative voice emerging from this alliance to be a sensually porous one with a capacity for an
immediate affective adjustment to the exterior environment. Thus, even though chronology is
somewhat of an organizing guide to the loci of Gurba’s being-in-the-world, I would argue that her affective positionality resets itself every fragment or chapter. Again and again, as the in-troductory phrases to the memoir foreclose, Gurba (while holding her reader by the hand) is propelled to “open her eyes”, “adjust” to an exterior world; and write her body through a reci-procity that absorbs and drips affective effects in the midst of it (Gurba 1). Gurba’s open-ended textual spaces where the conditions of attunement are inexhaustible mirror the produc-tion of potentiality. Thus, even though Mean re-tells the story of one woman’s personal histo-ry, the memoir can be read as living in the historical present. In the next section, I will explore how Gurba’s extended present – seemingly invariably and affectively prepared for unpredict-able potentials – harbors the harmful “intervention” of a trauma.
1.2 Ending an Open-End? Reconciling Potentiality with the Disruption of Trauma
In responding to affective forces, the historical present becomes an elongated now, an ever-emergent moment that serves as a densely corporeal and “experientially felt thing” (Ber-lant 64). It is also important to note that these affective modes of attunement to the historical present negotiate a sustenance within it. Affect concurrently fulfills an intermediary role in
the (re-) negotiation, management and adjustment to precarity. Acknowledging this precarity is to think of the historical present as a site where subjects manage and stabilize their embed-dedness in the face of “compromised conditions of possibility” (Berlant 24). In other words, affective responses keep subjects rooted within the ordinary and the everyday (Berlant 70). Subjects assume positions of adjustment or continuous “intuitive retraining in becoming-present” to the intensified sentience of the everyday (Berlant 77). But what if the conditions for sustenance in the everyday are radically altered? How do conditions of attunement attune to a disruption? In other words, how does affective attunement come into play when the grammar of the present is dramatically reorganized by the vernacular of a trauma? I will at-tempt to resolve these issues in reading exemplary scenes where Gurba’s faces the infiltration of threatening forces across her ordinary. On Gurba’s historical timeline, the scenes that I analyze would differ in that one takes place in the “pre-traumatic” era, while the others come from a “post-traumatic” age. In this section I will demonstrate how, affectively, this distinc-tion fails to hold up. Before turning to the text, however, the secdistinc-tion will attempt to dismantle the canonical model of trauma’s impact on the present.
Trauma theory developed rapidly from the 1990s onwards, prompting a traumatic turn grounded by leading theorists such as Dominick LaCapra, Cathy Caruth and Michael Roth-berg and chaperoned primarily by psychoanalytic and deconstructive concepts and approach-es. Presently, however, the direction the field has taken over the last decades is under in-creased scrutiny for the sake of preventing it from turning it onto a dead end (Rodi-Risberg 256). Some of the core concepts and models of trauma are being questioned in their “perti-nence and applicability” in line with more recent challenges to the field in the twenty-first century as well as insurgent trends outside of its own field (Rodi-Risberg 256). I contend that trauma theory has largely monopolized an understanding the crisis-intensified present. The field has constructed a, by now, nearly canonical model of the post-traumatic state. One of the
undeniable contributors to that model is Cathy Caruth; whose work Unclaimed Experience dedicates itself to investigating the afflicted “body” and wound of a trauma. In particular, I would like to turn to Caruth’s discussion of how that wound festers, matures and endures for the catastrophe-surviving individual. A Caruthian narrative on trauma always opens with an infliction of the wound, “not upon the body, but upon the mind” (3). It is a breach within the mind’s abiding experience of “time, self and the world”, too violent and devastating to be assimilated into consciousness at the moment of impact. Temporally, Caruth’s trauma is therefore bound to a duality, for what it lacks in “impact” at its first occurrence it makes up for by returning to haunt the survivor later on; “in its delayed appearance and belated address” (4). The issue of belatedness shapes the traumatic narrative through a double telling. That is, trauma simultaneously throws the individual into a “crisis of death” and “crisis of life”: an encounter with an unbearable event and the crisis of having survived it (Caruth 4). This para-doxical model of trauma that allows an endless echo to an already concluded event concur-rently proposes a scripted temporality that rigidly distinguishes between what is past and what is present. Caruth considers the crisis – once concluded - as having a belated recurrence, while disregarding the possibility for the crisis itself to be an ongoing factor.
The event-based model, thus, retains the singularity of the trauma; it is a closed disrup-tion that “stands out a-historically from the ordinary” (Berlant 80). The post-traumatic state, according to this model, serves as a site where a systemic crisis that still demands recognition is easily dismissed. It is for that reason that writers such as Andrea Long Chu (2017) have rendered the model as inadequate with more covert and continuous affective triggers that can equally threaten and tyrannize individuals. In her work, Chu demonstrates an increased sensi-tivity to, for example, micro-aggressions that often fail to accumulate into a singular event, crises where: “the event withdraws, or collapses, and in its wake goes up a cloud of low-grade, ordinary affects: ache, disappointment, perplexity, a bad taste in your mouth (…) and
no one returns to the scene of a crime that never happened” (303). Chu points to a collective and ongoing precarity of individuals that can be made visible by turning to an affective under-standing of trauma, as opposed to an evental one. By dismantling the predilection that crisis needs to go hand-in-hand with event, Chu blurs the boundaries between the pre- and post-traumatic altogether. In referencing Chu’s contribution I do not mean to imply that any in-stances of consensually recognized events are wholly incompatible with affective genres of the present. However, Chu’s work does show how Caruth’s “double telling” is in part redun-dant and that trauma is not only located in a breach of the self-evident when the present can-not be taken for granted as a reliable site of stability and effortless self-continuity in the first place. In any case, it is in part redundant, as I will argue, in Gurba’s history where the renew-able present is often punctuated with harmful or traumatizing occasions that do not amount into a recognized event.
This leads me to a different open-ended predicament, namely, how to maintain a sense of trauma’s impact onto a life – a sense, thus, of a pre- and post-traumatic state – while still acknowledging the modes of affective retention within the present that complicate trauma as “standing out”. According to the Caruthian narrative, to live in the shadow of a trauma satu-rates being-in-the-present with a constant awareness of the “inherent latency of the event” (Caruth 22). Past and present are rendered inextricable, and the belated impact of trauma man-ifests itself through a set of pre-determined and fixed symptoms: self-forgetting, repression and its return (Caruth 22). In that sense, the subject’s embeddedness is essentially already
cemented in the post-traumatic present that is, in turn, “sentenced to a terrifying suffusion of
the past” (Berlant 80). The Caruthian crisis and catastrophe, in their assumed exceptionality, thus shatter an assumed self-preservation in a world where individuals are supposed to feel stable but also limit the post-traumatic state in its ontological potential. The present becomes pre-defined by past trauma and, therefore, denies the subject of an ever-developing corporeal
situatedness (Berlant 81). As I have advocated up until now, however, is that to think of the historical present affectively is to think of it as a site where “bodies and lives are a kind of resonating chamber for perturbations” that both “strike us and run through us” while simulta-neously “strike us and beyond us” (Massumi 2015, 85). This means to say that (possible) per-turbations or disruptions are never the endpoint, but instead complicate the very notion of predetermination. Hence, even if an event or a trauma would shatter the “taken-for-grantedness” that keeps one secured to life from within, it does so in a manner that the post-traumatic state still opens itself up to new and ever-developing conditions of affective habita-tion in the world. As I will argue in the forthcoming analysis, this means that after the assault Gurba’s world may settle into shape “through rape-tinted glasses”, but it does not mean that Gurba’s way of sensing and feeling out her external environment is pre-ordained (Gurba 111). More so, it marks her immersion into somewhat of a hyper-vigilant or hyper-aware state that multiplies the possibilities of receiving and transmitting affective flows to and from her body. All in all, the affective conditions of attunement reconfigure the interception of trauma in, by no means, having a traumatic narrative end at the breach of the self-evident.
Despite the unpredictable organization and progression of Gurba’s episodic memoir, the traumatic narrative becomes subtly interweaved into the often isolated and autonomous position occupied by her microcosmic meditations. As the fragments are lacking in linearity, explicit chronology and a cathartic nature; Gurba creates coherence to her traumatic narrative by way of motif. Specifically, the traumatic narrative is first introduced in her use of “histo-ry”. Strictly speaking, by writing: “History is the place where I got molested”, referring back to a history class in verbatim (Gurba 156). This history class marks a troublesome vignette of her childhood between her, a cowardly classmate who touched her during the classes from under their shared table and “Mr. Hand”, the history teacher who deliberately turned a blind eye to the entire scene. The scene is at once opened in an enigmatic and painfully particular
manner; it is a clear punctum to Gurba’s associations to space and time while simultaneously appearing as an approximation to an event. For instance, the protagonists to the scene are in-troduced in both a dismissive yet specified manner as she recounts how Macaulay, the boy who first appeared in her life through an “unsanctioned kiss” off the “kissy clock” during a seemingly innocent game on the playground, is reintroduced into her life. Gurba writes:
He disappeared from my life after the second grade and reappeared in history. He be-came a part of history, mine and Mr. Hand’s. Mr. Hand, our seventh-grade history teacher, stood in front of the blackboard. Before him, rows of empty tables stretched to the back wall. We stood against this wall on the first day. We waited (…) To our left, sunlight streamed through a wall that was almost a window. Our profiles warmed. (…) Give-us-more-instructions was our vibe. Tell us what to do (24).
The significant fast-forward, from “second grade” to seventh-grade”, by which Gurba marks Macaulay’s contingency to her world denotes that he is merely a de-personalized presence with no significant history or development as a character worth narrating. Instead, she approx-imates him affectively. The final phrases to the fragment create a sense of Gurba familiarizing herself with her temporal present; noting, adjusting, feeling out aura and atmosphere, ulti-mately, waiting and creating an air of tension around the affects that Macaulay would (soon) emit. Gradually, Macaulay’s passive position is interchanged with his imposition into the fective site of the classroom – “under the table, a sensation intruded” (Gurba 24). It is an af-fective intrusion into the ordinary, however, that is not met with resistance but attunement as Gurba negotiates her sustenance into an environment that is displacing her. She freezes - “obeys the shh” – and learns how to “swallow [her] chance at rescue”, accordingly training herself affectively to absorb the over-intensified affects overflowing into the familiar (Gurba
25). Allowing her affective receptivity to submit to the transgression is, I would argue, a form of self-preservation that relies on forestalling the impending crisis from crystallizing into an event; thus, integrating herself affectively within a dread “that fears the event, as it’s only going to be confirming of the time one suffers as the historical present” (Berlant 88). In order forestall the event Gurba keeps herself harmonized to regularities, modulating affects accord-ingly so as to remain in a de-eventilized and de-dramatized extended present, even if that pre-sent is harmful. The extent at which Gurba “succeeds” in doing so, is revealed when towards the end of episode, she indicates the uncanny preservation of this extended crisis:
Around us, a concert of pencils scratched. Pages turned to no particular rhythm. (…) Mr. Hand’s eyes were watching the performance between my legs. It was symphonic. Macaulay played for no audience, but he had an audience of one (31).
In this passage, the felt atmosphere becomes materialized - in the pages turning and the pen-cils scratching – so that the rhythm achieved by the physical surroundings becomes an em-blem for the clean continuation of an affective consensus to which Mr. Hand and Macaulay, whether out of cruelty or cowardice, conform to. Gurba, apprehensive of her dread, similarly dreads an out-of-synchness with the rhythms of her environment. With an intentional irony, Gurba writes: “the reason I know that Mr. Hand taught history was ’History’ was the name of his class. I didn’t learn much history from him. My time with him taught me how to be quietly molested” (25). Through this logic, Gurba points out that whilst historical narratives were written out to her, her own history was still in the making. The past seems pointless in a tem-poral present that requires her immediate and constant adjustment to it; for Gurba, being in the present is polemic. Ultimately, by placing the two temporalizations in discordance with
each other, Gurba positions herself as a variable in a site of expansion and an ever-gathering accretion of forces that work against the deadlock of the event.
Nevertheless, that is not to say that the memoir denies the occurrence of event alto-gether as there is another crisis that creeps up on her and catches her, at once, off guard. She comes into contact with the traumatic event at a time where she describes herself as sub-merged obliviously into the everyday - titling the chapter “I Wandered Lonely as a Dissociat-ed Cloud” (119). This “default world” is promptly disruptDissociat-ed through the unexpectDissociat-ed attack that annuls the ongoing wherewithal of the ordinary by annihilating her body’s belonging within that world. Gurba is brutally raped by a, then, anonymous attacker. Gurba writes how at the moment of her assault she “[breaks] up with her body”, therefore temporarily suspend-ing her capacity to affect and be affected and, for that reason, her capacity to manage or at-tune to an over-intensified present. Thus, after breaking up with her body, the scene of Gurba’s assault is no longer a happening but an event. Bit by bit however, she manifests her-self back into the world through a gradual restoration of awareness of her corporeal embed-dedness: as she hears her own voice, the sounds of her heels clicking on the sidewalk and feels the welling of tears (120). The traumatic event is not accompanied with a breach of the self-evident but a “reshaped sensorium” (Berlant 83). Additionally, as the traumatic event disrupts her default world, Gurba demonstrates that arriving at the event is not an endpoint but that it remains open-ended as she, immediately after, writes:
My skin prickled. It felt like he was in everything. He wasn’t finished.
Things like that are never finished. Men like that are never finished (120).
The allusion to this sense of incompletion, I would argue, marks her immersion into the post-traumatic world. From this moment onwards, Gurba’s post-traumatic narrative does not over-determine her present by detaching it from potentiality but rather marks her transition into a mode of being with changed conditions of complexity. For that reason, the post-traumatic state does look different from the pre-traumatic – for, as Berlant has indicated, “trauma does not make experiencing the historical present impossible but possible” (81). This becomes ap-parent through a passage that appears shortly after the traumatic occurrence, where Gurba contrasts the violent event with a return to “normalcy”, through a scene where she runs every-day errands and goes food shopping with her Mom. While the pre-traumatic state of the histo-ry classroom was managed with Gurba attuning to the perturbations of the ordinahisto-ry flooding from the “outside-in”, the post-traumatic embeddedness reverses this mechanism. In the oth-erwise standardized setting of the supermarket, Gurba starts seeing her attacker everywhere:
Beside the whole grain loves, he paused.
His hands reached for hot dog buns. It squeezed. (…)
Each aisle brought the possibility of seeing him. I imagined him lurking, stocking up on Tang or Otter Pops. I saw flashes of him in nearly every man (…)
As quickly as the shopper had become him, he unbecame him. He settled back into his own features. My eyes adjusted to the similarities (125-6).
As this passage demonstrates, Gurba’s traumatized intuition opens up new possibilities and trajectories for perceiving the world around her, hallucinating her molester into being. That is, before returning to a more passive state of reception and adjustment – by letting her “eyes adjust to the similarities” – Gurba is actively projecting her re-shaped sensorium onto the ex-ternal environment (Gurba 126). For a moment, then, the post-traumatic mind leaves her with
a very different style of sovereignty than she demonstrates within her pre-traumatic world. In short, she becomes the touchstone to the emergent ecology around her, actively developing a nervous system that allows the post-traumatic world to settle into shape. If anything, Gurba does maintain an apprehension of the crisis’ seismic after-shocks. Only she transcribes these sensed remnants of the past so as to essentially become more deeply embedded into the world around her – actively transforming the act of self-continuity from the inside out. All in all, she demonstrates that the post-traumatic mind is brimming with potential, it is neither static nor predetermined but rather “has an advanced set of art skills” (125).
To conclude, in considering affective attunement as a modality for experiencing the present, I have demonstrated that a singular event fails to serve as the cornerstone to a trau-matic experience. Gurba’s immediate present is either engaged in the reduction of a harm (un) done or in anticipation of it. Trauma, then, is de-eventilized as the affective management of a crisis neither begins nor ends at the advent of the event. Finally, as the boundaries between the pre- and post- traumatic dissolve, what remains adrift is a definite affective burden that victims bear beyond the event. In the next chapter, I will evaluate whether that burden can be carried on into representation.
CHAPTER 2. TESTING THE TESTIMONY: FROM REPRESENTATION TO
CONVERSA-TION
If art’s a seismographic project, when that project meets with failure, failure must become a subject too.
Chris Kraus, I Love Dick
In the previous chapter, I have argued how Myriam Gurba’s memoir is simultaneously an act of story telling as well as an act of mapping her renewed, immediate immersion within that personal (hi)story. Besides that, Gurba also hoards the tales of others that are inextricably bound up with her own. The memoir is a, self-proclaimed, ghost story in that it reports on the sexual trauma another woman suffered at the hand of the same attacker who assaulted Gurba. Sophia Castro Torres’ story, as a California-based woman with Mexican roots like Gurba her-self, is synthesized with Gurba’s rape story through one specific detail: that both crimes were committed by the same man. Sophia Castro Torres is the ghost that haunts and prompts Gurba into unfolding another assault; compared to which Gurba thinks herself “privileged” in that while she survived her own, Sophia did not (Gurba 112). Sophia’s rape and murder presents Gurba with the painfully explicit possibility that her condition is also a shared condition. By integrating “a book within a book: the short, mean life of Sophia Torres” I would argue that
Mean tentatively includes an attention to what is general about crimes committed against
women (Gurba 112). In this chapter, I aim to interpret the extent at which this reality holds up rhetorically. In considering Gurba’s memoir as an integrated testimony to a trauma that is apparently collective and individual, this chapter will test whether Gurba wants to transcribe these traumas convincingly and cogently. This means that I will acknowledge Gurba’s textual testimony contextually too and take into consideration that feminist scholars have often con-sidered the act of testifying by itself as a direct intervention into rape culture. That is, this chapter will elucidate how the genre of the testimony is apprehended through feminist theory
desperately to be named, recounted, and made perceptible or representable. Here, I am refer-ring to a realist tradition in feminist theory that proclaims rape to be one of the clear facts of women’s lives, and for that matter advocates the act of speaking out in order to familiarize audiences with the necessary details and descriptions that can convince of that acute fact (Heberle 64). This is not an argument that I intend to carry on in this chapter. Picking up from where the previous chapter left off, I have argued how Gurba’s immediate affective position-ality within her own historical present de-eventilizes sexual trauma in that a singularly disrup-tive event fails to serve as the touchstone to its experience. Gurba’s “pre-traumatic” has her attuning to the violent affective disruptions into her everyday in suspense of the event, while the “post-traumatic” marks her immersion into a crisis mode that has not reached its full ca-pacity but rather operates along the ever-emergent potential of re-calibrated affect manage-ment. In this chapter, I will explore how Gurba’s textual transcription of the sexual assault complements her defiance of the event-based model of a trauma. Thus, I will argue that Gurba, in fact, does not want nor care for persuading her audience rhetorically of the reality of rape whereby reconstructing the event serves as an end in itself. Instead, I will demonstrate how she diverts from a realist reconstruction of the incident itself in the interest of indulging in the affective reaction the reception of her testimony can trigger. Altogether, this chapter will focus on the tentative attitude Gurba takes up when it comes to integrating substantiated “evidence” to her assault. Alongside the work of literary scholar Pieter Vermeulen, I will demonstrate how Gurba’s text emancipates from the generic expectations tied to the genre of a testimony. I will consider the manipulation, play and awareness of her form alongside Sianne Ngai’s and Andrea Long Chu’s thoughts on affective transmission between text and reader. Finally, I will argue that Gurba strays away from re-creating the scene of the incident and instead invokes a sense of it; all in accordance with a crisis-intensified condition that can
not be discharged at representation but necessitates the possibility of carrying on
conversa-tion.
2.1 Stories (Un) Told: Representation and Persuasion
Chu states that trauma and melodrama frequently travel together (Chu 308). The for-mer, companionless, often lacks the language of the latter. Representations of trauma often lack the flamboyance and panache that pave its way for a large enough platform within the public sphere. With one complementing the other, however, they act in a reciprocal relation-ship whereby melodrama pitches the trauma to a panel for the sake of establishing its political urgency or relevance, most probably by “tapping into national sentimentality and moral cred-it” while at it (Chu 308). This presumption, that the act of persuasion should operate hyper-bolically, is one that the feminist movement has suitably worked to supersede. Particularly when it comes to the violence left behind by sexual trauma – a form of violence that Gurba even dubs “classic” (Gurba 108) - feminist writers refuse to abide by descriptions of harm done that are styled hyperbolically. On the one hand, this has lead feminist writers to speak against “dramatized rape narratives” so as to “measure” women’s “moral” value or credentials in direct proportion to their sexual vulnerability (Chu 309)2. On the other hand, feminist thinkers advocating against sexual violence have argued that in the game of persuasion doing the bare minimum is enough. Here, I am referring to specific argument that contends that for ever-increasing levels of violence to be countered increased visibility makes up the method
2 Recent examples of this can be found within the work of Laura Kipnis’ (2015) essay Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe and Jennifer Doyle’s (2015) Campus Sex, Campus Security.
Kip-nis works to re-conceptualize rape narratives on campus, by integrating into the rhetoric of social policies on risk management/prevention an understanding of women as sexually sover-eign agents. Doyle critiques the bureaucratic guidelines and statutes on internal security that are being applied to college campuses while failing to apprehend the complexity of different
and the means. This argument contends that if a public sphere is not yet convinced of the real-ity of rape’s culture, society’s blind eye can be persuaded by turning up the volume on the stories told and retold across the afflicted culture3. Renee Heberle explains that there is an
assumption that as long as “we put faces on the numbers”, render the statistics recognizable qualitatively instead of quantitatively, describe the horror and all in all allow the reality of sexual suffering to be spoken out about; this, in turn, will eventually guarantee the eradication of sexual violence altogether (Heberle 64). If, then, women’s sexual suffering is an ever-enlarged map that merely needs the cartography to capture it, this argument also implies a presumed inextricability between world and text. From this realist logic, where text and testi-mony are the pieces to the puzzle of a reality that “resists finishing”, it follows that once a society is exposed to its internal truth the terms of its existence will be altered (Heberle 64). I explicitly refer to this argument as “realist” as it invests in the text’s totalizing ability to cap-ture an essential “truth”, which is typical of realist literary criticism. Moreover, it is important to note that this particular branch in feminist theory has received criticism from an alternative angle that is often a common adversary to realists, namely, from postmodern and poststruc-turalist critics4. What I am interested in however is the extent at which Gurba’s brave
3 See, for further reference, Mary E. Hawkesworth’s (1989) work “Knowers, Knowing,
Known: Feminist Theory and Claims of Truth”, which presents rape as a clear and transparent reality to women’s lives that should be granted epistemological access through text and testi-mony. Similarly, in Transforming a Rape Culture a disparate collection of women’s personal stories is assembled as a critical contribution to inciting movement in anti-rape campaigns.
4 Writers such as Sharon Marcus (1992) have critiqued the realist tendency to put word back
in the world. Her essay works to come closer to the immanent structure of rape, without as-suming it as an inevitable material fact of life, in order to approximate prevention and inter-vention. Instead of looking for the language to integrate rape narratives into reality, Marcus approaches rape as a language that, in true postmodern fashion, cannot be bred outside of discourse. Similarly, Renee Heberle’s (1996) article insists on deconstructive strategies to intervene in, what she assumes as, assumptions on a monolithic reality of sexual violence in order to interrupt dominant discourses around sexuality and gender that confirm masculinist power. I emphasize the two counter-arguments to the realist argument, not to reconcile the, to this day, unresolved inclinations towards deconstructive or assertive and totalizing inclina-tions within feminist critique; but to emphasize my own advancement towards a more situated
ny can be considered as an act of speaking out albeit towards a different outcome – that is, as I will elucidate later, to not merely provide an increased visibility to trauma but rather translate into the text what it means to attune to and carry on trauma’s affective burden. If, indeed, “we say that the issue of sexual violence must be personalized” (Heberle 64) and that, indubitably, there are “historically concrete reasons to take apart the assumed “reality” that is the event of sexual violence” (Heberle 71), I aim to – as this chapter progresses - explore the enigmatic tendencies to Gurba’s testimony that consciously withhold information for the sake of the fact that “some parts feel too personal for the historical record” (Gurba 154).
But first, not all stories in Mean are waiting to be told; and neither is Gurba afraid to go out of her way to look for them nor does she shy away from a sizeable serving of verisi-militude in so doing. For instance, the novel is saturated with popular references to women who are known survivors of sexual harassment and assault such as Anita Hill (Gurba 169) and Ana Mendieta (Gurba 32). And from known to unknown, the text also incorporates folklore-like allusions to the victims of violence that are anonymous to Gurba. The first and foremost story that she tells, however, is her ghosts’ story: that of Sophia Torres. Gurba opens Sophia’s story in “Oakley Park”, the site where, as the reader learns later on in the novel, Sophia was ambushed and assaulted (3). This story is, at first regard, a determined plea against the horri-ble silence that surrounds it. Gurba competes against this silence, or in other words, against a lack of sound, breath and words spent on the assault of Sophia Torres. For “nothing squeaks or whimpers” before Gurba’s writing unapologetically speeds up (Gurba 1). Whether the memoir takes up a stance on the cartography of women’s sexual suffering is not yet commu-nicated in the opening pages to the first chapter, but it is clear that, in any case, it seeks out a
substantiation of it. Gurba seems to want Sophia to occupy space. And so, Gurba moves from
indefinite article and third-person objective: “a dark haired girl walks alone” (1) – before moving towards a more urgent and demanding manner of writing her subject into being:
She slouches. She walks as if in mourning. She steps into the outfield.
She pauses (1).
Gurba’s transition from the impersonal pronoun to the repetitive and quick assertion of the more personalized “she” suggests the need to approach Sophia with a close attention to her every move. The writing resembles that of a screenplay, as if Gurba is textually performing a realist play of Sophia’s embeddedness. The use of the short and staccato sentences accumu-lates into a painfully precise run-through of the assault. Realist elements not only occupy the style to this write-up, but also its content. What is written into existence is by no means an estimation of the event, as Gurba inundates her textual landscape with details: from the color of the attacker’s clothes, blots of blood on baseball benches, or the items Sophia scatters in panic; ”two receipts” and “a nail file” (2). Even as Gurba wields the most seemingly intrusive of details in the name of elicitation - “cum oozes between her legs” – these supersensitive samples that “gleam like unspeakable poetry” are almost presented as if coming from a posi-tion of consolaposi-tion and catharsis (2). For, once Gurba seals off the incident, she places it in direct juxtaposition with a sobering follow-up to her own write-up, namely: “a newscaster described the murder as ‘the bludgeoning death of a transient in Oakley Park”” (3). Faced with the “cruel” contrast between the two forms of description, the reader is brought to con-sider that the two are not just different in measurement but also in merit (Gurba 3). The abun-dance of the former description allows Sophia to “matter”, while the evident elisions in the latter are a direct reduction of her reality – “it reduces her to transience” (Gurba 3). In the
opening passage to the novel, Gurba’s writing seems to recognize merit in the aforementioned realist rhetoric. However, in placing Sophia’s assault on an amplified platform in order to get a more of a solid grip on the reality of it, she merely manages to point out a double bind. As opposed to the optimism implied in the realist argument held by feminist thinkers, Gurba’s investment in an accurate reproduction of the assault is less productive. In fact, although Gurba has replaced the dry description of the transient figure with colorful detail, she presents the eventual denouement of these details much more pessimistically. Writing violence into existence does not become a question of representation but rather of the space post-representation, the reception. Respectively, despite the efforts of the memoir’s opening pages, Gurba demonstrates how the representation of violence – whether met with the necessary (over-) exaggeration, or not – inevitably sinks into banalization. Towards the conclusion of the first chapter, the author takes up a brave final attempt at testing, quite literally, the afteref-fect of speaking out. The outcome is equally oblique to silence for, in uttering the name of the transient figure, Gurba achieves nothing but a “transient sibilance” (Gurba 4; emphasis add-ed).
On that note, thus, Gurba proceeds from speaking out towards her stance on the act as such. Thus far, I have demonstrated that in Mean the story does not speak for itself, which can be corroborated further through a closer look at the memoir’s critique on a traumatic testimo-ny’s (after-) effects. The formula I have been critiquing up until now presents as its customary binding sequence: the advent of event, matched with the revelatory power of representation for truth and the commotion and social accommodation that follows from having connected the dots to violent systems of discretion. Mean, I would argue, dislodges this succession. It is important to note, that before Gurba possessed her own personalized story of assault, before she turned into a teller of that tale, she was also a receiver of other tales. In an introduction to the stories that preceded her own, she first writes how: “some of us use rape to tell time”
(Gurba 99). However, she then urges her reader to consider the stories that came before her own as: “a prescient wrinkle in time” (Gurba 99). This prescient wrinkle in time is a bypass, the unconventional connection between stories told and untold. The passage that follows this shows the trans-generational truth of other realities that lived in the private, domestic spaces of Gurba’s childhood. The other realities, are the legends and stories told alongside each other by Gurba’s abuelita to her mother and onwards; stories of “violaciones” by Mexican revolu-tionaries whose victims were not granted the privilege to tell their tale themselves (Gurba 100). Dismally, however, the tales offered to young Gurba both live and die in the domestic space. The tales are subtly interwoven into the daily routines and dynamics of the family in a fashion that is far from disruptive – “she told me legends to keep me still while she dabbed a canvas with oil paints. She painted my portrait and told me stories” (Gurba 100; emphasis added). Violence is recognized, administered and represented by members of the Gurba fami-ly but with no sign of the simple formula of cause and effect or, in other words, recognition and reaction. To consider these stories in terms of their “prescience” would suggest that their after-effects are merely pending. However, Gurba dislodges this possibility altogether in con-sidering them as a “prescient wrinkle in time”; suggesting, instead, that the tales that are wait-ing to be told are already as old as time (Gurba 99; emphasis added). Thus, Gurba suggests that a realist representation of the traumatic event(s) – both in quality and quantity – does not serve as an absolving end in itself. Trauma remains as much a reality both before and after reaching an accordant representation. If persuasion is and never was the point, the next sec-tion will deliberate on how Gurba deems it appropriate to bring her trauma into text.
2.2: “Some Parts Feel Too Personal For the Historical Record”: Testifying Affective Weight Thus far, I have argued that persuasion and representation are wholly dissociated in Gurba’s testimony. What happens to the stories once told might be better addressed in terms of an unmitigated or, strictly speaking, felt reality. My contention is that the felt presence both absorbed and released by the testimony is not as easily represented or received. Chu suitably notes that one of the most menacing features of sexual trauma is its continuity, in that “trauma scuttles the event, but affect doesn’t go down with the ship” (310). The presence that remains buoyant is trauma’s affective weight, namely, the felt presence – or processing – of a trauma past its event (Chu 310). In this section, I will analyze how that felt subsistence is kept intact and autonomous in Gurba’s text. Intact, from what happens after representation, namely, the eventual appropriation by an audience.
How affective weight is not safe from appropriation is shown in a key encounter, where Gurba recounts a dialogue shared between her and another woman, Patricia. Within that conversation Patricia presents a personal interpretation of the stories of violación to which both women had been extensively exposed – Gurba through her grandmother and Pa-tricia by working in a women’s shelter (Gurba 107). What PaPa-tricia takes from these private experiences made public, is the disquieting idea that “some of the ladies”, conceivably, “like it” (Gurba 107). Her clarification, Gurba writes, is as follows:
She went on, “We had one lady who came in and her husband had stuck his rifle inside of her and threatened her. She stayed with him. How could you stay after someone did that to you if you didn’t like it?”
I thought I understood how a lady could loathe a situation like that but stay in it, but I felt ill equipped to explain this paradox. I was a C student (Gurba 107).
This passage indicates a definite discrepancy. For, although the trauma has no trouble re-materializing itself in dreadful detail, the affective affiliations to the event - for both victim and spectator – have remained ambivalent. Chu argues that this type of continued ambiguity is often used against victims, as she quotes law scholar Michelle Anderson who has argued that, particularly in rape cases, “clever defense lawyers continue to find ways to introduce complainants’ sexual histories as evidence of consent” (310). Much like the clever defense lawyers, Patricia is part of a public that seems to assimilate a mere appearance with apprehen-sion. Patricia assumes that her own subjective assessment of a representation must emanate as an “intrinsic property” to the depiction itself (Ngai 82). This, in turn, leaves the situated and personal experience of the crisis-intensified condition – that, as I have argued in the previous chapter, never begins nor ends at the advent of the event - open for problematic
appropria-tion. The act of appropriating the affective weight is what creates a constant tension between
representation and response; a tension that Gurba, despite “being a C student”, consciously writes against in her testimony.
The psychological suffering to a trauma is one that cultural critics have often assumed as having a one-to-one relationship with the chosen medium of representation. Pieter Ver-meulen writes that the genre of trauma fiction has an unquestioned investment in its literary form as being able to offer an intermediary mirror or window into the suffering soul5. He ar-gues that the genre is predicated upon an authoritative psychological realism; meaning that literary form is assumed to grant pristine insight into the traumatized psyche (Vermeulen 26). This convergence between form and psyche is not limited to a necessity of realist literary
conventions either. For, when deliberately employed, Vermeulen emphasizes that even
5 Pieter Vermeulen’s recent work (2015) is a comprehensive critique that is particularly
cen-tered around the end of the novel as a literary form. Amongst the generic expectations of the novel, there is an assumed aptitude of the trauma novel in representing interiority and psycho-logical depth; which is what Vermeulen complicates in the first chapter to his work, in his
gies that appear incompatible as realist conventions – such as “fragmentation, temporal dislo-cation and repetition” – can act as reflections to the subject’s traumatized state (Vermeulen 28). Upholding the one-on-one connection between form and an understanding of psychologi-cal suffering in turn underlies, what Vermeulen refers to as, the “cultural power” of trauma fiction (Vermeulen 28). This presumed one-on-one connection solidifies, for instance, the ability to evoke empathy, identification or even social accommodation (Vermeulen 28). Such a cultural power is similarly expected from the testimony as a genre; for, as I have demon-strated, the success of the testimony depends on piecing together the puzzle that is rape cul-ture through representations that are equated with persuasion.
This brings me to Gurba’s rebellion, or the manner in which she questions the testi-mony’s “meaning-making mandate” (Vermeulen 4). This rebellion primarily manifests itself in the explicitly enigmatic tendencies to her text that she is not afraid to present to a public that, as I have argued, is constantly thirsty for more detail to usurp (Gurba 154). As any canny revolutionary, she is not afraid to frustrate and disappoint. Vermeulen argues that a text is able to frustrate its own assumed cultural power, by conspiring with its own context (4). This means that the text first needs to construct an understanding of its own meaning-making man-date before declaring it as defunct; creating an intricate process of “construction and disman-tling” (Vermeulen 4). Gurba, as a rebellious narrator, also disobeys an established order. And accordingly, the logic of the established order first needs to be explained before it can be sab-otaged. She sets up the inner workings of the status quo in a speculative antebellum within the text, that is, in a calm before the storm. Specifically, after having revealed the ubiquity of “other” stories of assault and being on the verge of revealing her own; she shows how she wants her story to stray away from the more familiar path of representation, reception, and appropriation. She writes:
A possessive part of me wants to hoard this story. I want to chipmunk or squirrel away the memory of this event, place it in a tree trunk with the memories of all the other rapes, attempted rapes, and gropes, memories that will never be released or consumed (Gurba 108; emphasis added).
This fragment appears solemnly before Gurba announces her own story. It serves as a sober-ing engagement with what is expected of her intimate story. The passage shows that she is aware that her story’s life span does not complete at reception; but rather that her text’s objec-tive content will be subjected to a subjecobjec-tive absorption that is contingent to the personal preference and taste of the consumer. Furthermore, Gurba also acknowledges that this act of subjective consumption takes place in direct proportion to the portion of the objective materi-al. The more content offered, the more that is available for (mis) appropriation. She comments on how the public that “[asks] to eat” one of her “traumatic acorns” is really after its “seeds” – the most intricate details and particulars – in order to arrive at a possible identification with or simply a judgment on her psychological experience (Gurba 108). For that reason, Gurba pro-tects herself by pacing herself. She denies her public the “satisfaction” of subjective sense-making in noting:
Some of my reality wanted to, and wants to, remain private. (…) Sometimes, it’s best to protect what the arms, faces, fingers and mouths of strangers have done to you from misinterpretation. Like a chipmunk, I hoard the memory of all the sensations that hap-pened to me that afternoon by the railroad tracks. I invite some people to experience parts of the assemblage (Gurba 154).
Withholding the details of what the “arms, faces, fingers and mouths of strangers” have done to her protects her against an alternative form of violence that the mouths and ears of strangers can magnify, modify and maintain (Gurba 154). What I would argue, finally, is that what is being withheld is not a matter of fact, but matter of affect. Not that “some parts” are “too personal for the historical record” – as methods for realist representation are already
ex-pected in abundance – but, rather, that some parts feel too personal for the historical record,
meaning that trauma’s affective weight cannot be predictably transposed to and from its tes-timony.
That is not to say that this conscious manipulation and refusal to offer a window into the suffering soul renders Gurba’s text as a neutral and affectless text. If anything, it enables her text to have an agency of its own that is relatively autonomous from the immediate grati-fication expected from the genre of the testimony. Gurba interferes in her own testimony by meddling with a “foreseeable” transposition of the affective weight to and from the text (Ngai 81). This intervention can be referred to through what Sianne Ngai dubs as an interruption in “a perfectly symmetrical circuit of affective communication” (Ngai 81). For example, metrical models of affective conveyance would include empathy or projection and other sym-pathetic strategies that make text into “an object of concern” by creating an immediate and predictable emotional resonance (Ngai 82). Such symmetrical models are neat and enclosed. In the case of empathy, the reader directly “feels” with and for characters in the text, meaning that the “reflexive circuit” between receiver and transmitter is airtight. Projection, too, makes the text into a directly transparent entity. In the act of projection, the reader perceives the manifest content as a “mirror reflection” of his or her own affective response to it, so that each confirms the other “in an imaginary loop” (Ngai 82). For Gurba to resist an immediate affective appropriation of her text, hence, requires her to pull the plug on this symmetrical circuit. But as I have mentioned, this does not mean that the text is rendered affectless. The
