On 18 March 2015 we had the rare opportunity to interview the celebrated American author Dave Eggers and Mimi Lok, co-founder with Eggers of the socially engaged oral history non-profit Voice of Witness, in front of a student audience at the Vooruit cultural center in Ghent, Belgium. The occasion for their visit was Eggers’s being awarded the 2015 Amnesty International Chair at Ghent University in recognition of his human rights work. The interview aimed to give the audience an overall sense of the various creative and charitable projects in which Eggers and Lok are involved and which have earned them widespread acclaim. This published version of it is an edited and condensed transcript. The interview consists of two parts. The first part deals with Eggers’s literary work, homing in on The Circle in particular. The second part focuses on Voice of Witness and on how this project relates to Eggers’s work as a writer.

The Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit is central to the psychoanalytical understanding of trauma. However, it has not received much attention within the contemporary field of trauma studies. This paper attempts to reconstruct the logic inherent to this concept by examining Freud’s remarks on the case of Emma. Furthermore, it is argued that Nachträglichkeit offers an interesting perspective on both (a) the well-established yet controversial finding that traumatic reactions sometimes follow in the wake of non-Criterion A events (so-called minor stressors or life events) and (b) the often-neglected phenomenon of delayed-onset PTSD. These two phenomena will appear to be related in some instances. Nachträglichkeit clarifies one way in which traumatic encounters are mediated by subjective dimensions above and beyond the objective particularities of both the event and the person. It demonstrates that the subjective impact of an event is not given once and for all but is malleable by subsequent experiences.

There exists a conceptual parallel between psychological accounts of psychic trauma on the one hand, and French philosopher Alain Badiou’s notion of the event on the other: both are defined by a relation of incommensurability or excessiveness with regard to the pre-existent context or system. Further development of this parallel, i.e., viewing trauma as an event in the Badiouian sense, enables us to pinpoint and clarify a logical fallacy at work in psychological theories of post-traumatic growth. By thinking of trauma recovery as a process of accommodating the preexistent mental schemata to the “new trauma-related information,” these theories risk taking as a given that which must first be constituted by the subject: the “content” (i.e., “information”) of the trauma. By emphasizing the necessity of the activity of the subject for the development of a new context that allows the event to be “read,” Badiou’s theory of the subject offers a way around the aforementioned logical fallacy. In so doing, it re-introduces the essential yet generally neglected political dimension of trauma recovery. This is illustrated through the example of the speak-outs of the 1970s women’s liberation movement.

This essay interrogates the nature, limits, and effects of the juxtaposition of Great Britain and Melanesia that takes place in Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995), the final installment of the much-lauded Regeneration trilogy. Published two years before the handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China, which marked the unofficial end of the British Empire, and four years after the end of the neocolonial charade of the first Gulf War, The Ghost Road brings its readers back to the beginning of the twentieth century, cannily meshing a carefully researched portrayal of the First World War with its protagonist’s dreams and memories of a Melanesian society suffocating under the oppressive weight of colonial law. Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s concept of postcolonial melancholia, we read the success of the Booker Prize-winning novel as reflecting a deep-seated anxiety about the downfall of empire(s) that continues to characterize political life in the West. The novel’s strength lies in the way it highlights the insidious workings of class prejudices on the front lines, the complex matrix of sexuality, duty, and friendship that defined relationships between men in the trenches, and the reshuffling of traditional gender roles that the war brought about both at home and abroad. In spite of its merits, however, the transformative and challenging confrontation with the human cost of Britain’s imperial  transgressions that The Ghost Road offers is consistently deferred and masked behind its more visible portrayal of the melancholic fantasy of a racially homogenous, tragic, and exclusively Western First World War.

In their article “McSweeney’s and the Challenges of the Marketplace for Independent Publishing” Katrien Bollen, Stef Craps, and Pieter Vermeulen argue that the artistic projects of the US-American author, activist, and editor Dave Eggers are marked by a tension between the desire for independence and the demands of brand-building. The article offers a close analysis of the materiality and paratexts of one particular issue of McSweeney’s, the literary magazine of which Eggers is the founding editor. Both the content and the apologetically aggressive tone of Eggers’s editorial statements betray a deep unease with the inability to inhabit a cultural and economic position that is untainted by the compromises that publishing requires. Still, this disavowed complicity with the market in fact sustains Eggers’s editorial practice in McSweeney’s, which, in marked contrast to his explicit statements, thrives on a dynamic of commodification.

Michael Chabon’s novella The Final Solution (2004), which first appeared in the Paris Review in 2003 with the subtitle A Story of Detection, lends itself to being interpreted as an allegory of man’s futile quest for understanding of the Holocaust. In this reading, the detective story that the novella recounts against the background of the Nazi extermination of the Jews illustrates the inaccessibility of the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust to rational inquiry. The Final Solution can thus be seen to abide by the demands of what Gillian Rose has called Holocaust piety; that is, devotion to the idea that the Nazi genocide is a radically unique event outside of human history, ineffable, beyond comprehension, and impervious to analysis. Our reading of The Final Solution, however, supplements and complicates the standard interpretation of the novella as an exercise in Holocaust piety by focusing on an “impious” subtext that appears to contradict some of the text’s more overt assumptions. We argue that the novella challenges the dominant conception of the Holocaust as an incomprehensible, ineffable, sacred event by returning the Nazi genocide to the realm of history – more specifically, the history of a colonizing Western modernity. The Final Solution breaks with Holocaust piety, we contend, through the proliferation of mirroring effects that suggest continuities and parallels between the Third Reich and the European colonial empires and between the plights of their respective victims.

Considered in terms of a struggle over definitions of trauma and recovery, the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the criticisms levelled against it, and the literary response it has evoked shed an interesting light on debates currently being waged by scholars in the field of trauma studies over the perceived monocultural bias of trauma theory in its “classical,” mid-1990s formulation and the fraught relationship between such tendencies and the commitment to social justice on which the field prides itself. In Writing History, Writing Trauma Dominick LaCapra reflects that the TRC “was in its own way a trauma recovery center” (43). The TRC attempted to uncover the truth about the gross human rights violations committed during apartheid and to promote national unity and reconciliation through a collective process of working through the past. I will demonstrate that, insofar as the TRC mapped Euro-American concepts of trauma and recovery onto an apartheid-colonial situation, it was subject to the same problems and limitations faced by trauma theory—problems and limitations which post-apartheid literature has not been slow to confront. The novelist André Brink has famously declared that “unless the enquiries of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) are extended, complicated, and intensified in the imaginings of literature, society cannot sufficiently come to terms with its past to face the future” (30). I will show that Sindiwe Magona’s truth-and-reconciliation novel Mother to Mother (1998)—a fictionalized account of the Amy Biehl killing—assumes just this task: it can be seen to supplement the work of the TRC by critically revisiting its limits, exclusions, and elisions—and thus also to suggest a possible way for “traditional” trauma theory to reinvent and renew itself.

The poetry of Eavan Boland, Ireland’s leading woman poet, is marked by an acute awareness of the problems attendant on the recovery of the experience of subaltern or oppressed women. Rather than usurping the place of the other and presuming to speak for her, Boland’s work stages the poet’s attempt to gain access to the experience of the other and ponders the difficulties and contradictions involved in this endeavour. It does not so much perform an act of ventriloquism—it does not make the subaltern speak, to invoke Gayatri Spivak’s notorious question— as interrogate her silencing and bear witness to an experience that remains fundamentally irrecoverable. Through an analysis of a number of poems which commemorate the victims of the Famine (‘‘The Achill Woman,’’ ‘‘Outside History,’’ ‘‘The Journey,’’ and ‘‘Fever’’), I argue that at the heart of Boland’s testimonial project is an ethics of love—love, not as self-serving benevolence, narcissism, or fusion, but as a non-appropriative encounter with the other which calls the self into question. This ethical love manifests itself not in the poet’s recovery of the voices of subaltern women, but in her invention of a mode of writing that bears witness to its own incapacity of recovering what lies outside history.

This paper presents a reading of J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) which explores the author’s struggle with the question of how art might remember suffering without forgetting it. Against claims that he “abstains” from or “holds himself clear” of history, I argue that Coetzee does engage with history in his work, albeit not in any straightforward manner. Waiting for the Barbarians does not recover history as a fully narratable subject, but bears witness to it by refusing to translate the suffering engendered by colonial oppression into historical discourse. The barbarian girl with whom the novel’s protagonist becomes involved is a figure of alterity that embodies a material, unverbalizable history of suffering. Rather than attempting to gain imaginative access to the experience of the other and thereby reducing the other to the same, Coetzee insists on the need to respect the irreducible otherness of the other. Only by opening itself up to a radical experience of abjection, of becoming other, can the self truly witness the suffering of the other.

While Waiting for the Barbarians offers little in the way of resolution or redemption, the text does seem to me to affirm the ground of a certain solidarity. The antihistoricist ethics of remembrance which Coetzee’s novel can be seen to embrace points towards the creation of a more inclusive collectivity, a community that would not be dependent on the affirmation of identity or sameness but founded on a recognition of our infinite difference. This desire to redraw the boundaries of community aligns Coetzee’s novel with the ethico-political project undertaken by Giorgio Agamben in the Homo Sacer series. I will consider Waiting for the Barbarians in the light of Agamben’s analysis of the contemporary biopolitical conditions of existence, which the novel graphically dramatizes, and of his account of testimony as a quintessentially ethical practice in relentless opposition to sovereign power’s reduction of human life to bare life.

The events of September 11, 2001 caused a rupture not only in the normal order of things, but also, and perhaps especially, in the signifying systems underwriting that order. The Naudet brothers’ remarkable 9/11 documentary, which aired on CBS on March 10, 2002 and on TV stations around the world on the first anniversary of the attacks, seeks to re-institute the authority of the conventions and constructions of a culture whose limits the events of September 11 had painfully exposed. The film – entitled 9/11 – is marked by a fundamental tension between the revelation of an abysmal crisis of meaning on the one hand and the desire to bring this crisis under control on the other. The film-makers attempt to mitigate the traumatic potential of their unique atrocity footage by sanitizing it and integrating it into a Hollywood-style coming-of-age drama tracing a probationary firefighter’s perilous journey from innocence to experience. Thus, the focus shifts from a disorienting and overwhelming sense of loss to comforting, ideologically charged notions of heroism and community which perpetuate an idealized national self-image and come to function as a moral justification for retaliation. In its drive to obtain mastery over trauma by rendering it legible in terms of existing cultural codes, 9/11 appears to disregard what Cathy Caruth calls “the event’s essential incomprehensibility, the force of its affront to understanding” (154). Yet, for all its investment in a classical realist aesthetic, the film remains haunted by a traumatic history that exceeds and breaks down accustomed habits of thought, narration and visualization.

Criticism of British postmodern realist fiction has long been marked by an almost total disregard for ethics. The reason why critics investigating the anti-representational strategies characterizing the work of such writers as Peter Ackroyd, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Graham Swift have for the most part remained silent about its ethical status is the widespread belief that ethics is incompatible with a questioning stance towards representation. The few academic critics who (claim to) have discovered some sort of ethical value in the self-reflexive, theoretically sophisticated fictions produced by these writers are liberal-humanists working in the Arnoldian-Leavisite tradition, who, in their search for moral truths, appear to be oblivious to specifically postmodern textual practices that block easy access to meaning. Taking its cue from the deconstructive type of ethical criticism that came to the fore in the 1990s, this article suggests an alternative to both the textualist neglect and the liberal-humanist misrecognition of the ethics of British postmodern realism. Through a reading of Graham Swift’s 1992 novel Ever After, it shows that postmodern realist fiction has an ethical dimension qua postmodern realist fiction; an ethical dimension that cannot be reduced to the promulgation of traditional moral values but rather has to be conceived as the elaboration of a post-humanist, non-foundational ethics of alterity.

Graham Swift’s writing space may be described as the liminal zone between modernity, with its now-discredited grand narratives, and a tentative and tantalizing postmodernity, to be created out of the debris of the past. Out of this World, Swift’s fourth novel, reflects on the part (to be) played by photographic and textual representation in mediating this critical transition. The aim of this article is to analyse this mediating process and to assess its ethical import at this particular historical juncture. It argues that the novel reveals the widely-held belief in the demystifying function of both photography and fiction to be complicitous with a dubious evasion of ethical responsibility, and that it puts forward the arduous and painful process of working through a traumatic reality as a precondition for the creation of a future which would be truly otherwise, not a stale repetition of the past but something radically new and as yet unimaginable.

Graham Swift’s debut novel The Sweet Shop Owner recounts the final day in the life of an ageing shopkeeper whose wife has died and who is estranged from his daughter. It diagnoses the demise of a way of life based on the principles of predictability, immobility and economic circularity. In my reading, the impasse in the narrative present is accounted for by the characters’ failure seriously to engage with trauma. The mechanisms of denial to which they take recourse prove inimical to life, and yet remain in place right until the end of the novel. Tantalizing flashes of an alternative modus vivendi are offered through the rebellion of the protagonist’s daughter against the oppressive regime imposed by her parents, but the suggestion that there is no possibility of achieving real change is at least equally prominent in the text. Envisaging the possibility of genuine renewal appears to be a deeply problematic undertaking. In exposing the ravages wreaked by a determined evasion of a catastrophic history, The Sweet Shop Owner inaugurates Swift’s search for a way of coming to terms with trauma that would create the conditions for the invention of a more humane, just and less destructive future, a quest which is taken up and doggedly pursued in the author’s later novels.

This article investigates different feminist positions on the contentious question of women’s autobiography through a critical reading of two key autobiographical texts from the interwar period, namely Jean Rhys’s novel Voyage in the Dark and Virginia Woolf’s memoir “A Sketch of the Past.” Whereas liberal-humanist feminists tend to regard autobiographical writing as an indispensable part of feminism’s emancipatory project, whose interests it allegedly furthers by inspiring a sense of female identification and solidarity, poststructuralist theorists accuse women’s autobiographies of harming the feminist cause by uncritically reiterating the patriarchal ideology of subjectivity-as-truth. My reading of Rhys’s and Woolf’s texts points up the need to negotiate a position in between the liberal-feminist and the poststructuralist stance on autobiography. A preliminary outline of such a position, which would avoid the twin pitfalls of voluntarism and determinism, is provided in the work of Rita Felski.