In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Cathy Caruth discusses how often “texts of… literature…both speak about and speak through the profound story of traumatic experience” (4). J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace is not only about the effects of an individual trauma, that of Lucy’s rape, but also about the collective historical trauma of a race who has undergone years of violence and contempt at the hands of their white oppressors. Cathy Caruth claims that “history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own, that history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas” (24). The effects of the violent rape that Lucy experiences parallel the effects of trauma of the victims of apartheid. Because she is traumatized by the violent act of rape, Lucy withdraws to a world of suppression and silence. Because of the debilitating effects of trauma, she is unable to put into words the unspeakable act she has endured. Likewise, the victims of apartheid were forcibly silenced and rendered unable to verbally articulate the many atrocities imposed upon them.
“Reenactment of one’s own victimization seems to be a major cause of the cycle of violence” that often occurs to victims of trauma (van der Kolk 199). After years of racial cruelty and humiliation, the three black men who rape Lucy are attempting to take back some of the power they have been robbed of. Although Coetzee is in no way condoning the act of violence against a white woman in order to gain power over their oppressors, he is instead showing the likely effects of the kind of anger and rage that come out of apartheid. Trauma expert Judith Herman states that traumatic events “shatter the construction of the self that is formed and sustained in relation to others. They undermine the belief systems that give meaning to human experiences…and violate the victim’s faith in a natural or divine order” (51). In Disgrace, Coetzee is showing how many of the victims of apartheid have lost faith with man’s ability for compassion as well with their own.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Print.
Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery. New York, NY: Basic, 1992. Print.
Van Der Kolk, Bessel A. "The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma." Trauma: Explorations in Memory. By Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 158-82. Print.
1 comment:
Hi Joanne,
I liked your post it brought some interesting issues that I had not thought about. I can see what you mean about trauma and see how it relates to the idea of history. I really liked the quote from Cathy Caruth that states "that history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas." This made me think not only of Lucy and the rapists, but of David Laurie and Melanie. The reason I like this idea of history being the result of us in a sense clashing is because I feel that David in a sense clashed with Melanie, and pretty much everyone around him. I say this because I saw the novel in an allegorical way and saw David as standing in for the old South Africa and so his clashing with everyone around him represents the way in which there is "[no] country...for old men," no space in the new South Africa for the old, and in a sense it has to be expelled and cast out. (Disgrace, pg. 190) I think that David represents that "historical trauma" as you say, he is a figure of white power, and it is why Mr. Issacs states, "how are the mighty fallen," when he is talking to David because he is a stand in for the old oppressive regime that is beginning to crumble. (Disgrace, pg. 167) What I am trying to say is that I think the novel deals with both the trauma that a whole race of people have suffered, the blacks of South Africa, but that Coetzee is also dealing with the trauma of the white South Africans, which they must now go through in order to create change in the country.
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