Trauma's internal transformation: anticipating unconsciousness in The Master of Petersburg

ABSTRACT

This article parts ways both with conventional application of trauma theory to J.M. Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg and with critical evaluations that focus primarily on metafiction and allegory. Instead, I argue that Dostoevsky's attempts to mourn Pavel involve a sustained meditation on the traumatized mind examining the conditions of its own trauma, figured in a character suffering from unexpected fits of epilepsy (as the real-life Dostoevsky did). First, I demonstrate how working through trauma in literary studies is predicated on psychoanalytic precepts of active focus and temporal unity. I then read the topic of unconsciousness through Jean-Luc Nancy's theorization of sleep as a passive “endomorphosis” that suggests the approach of transformation without actualizing that transformation. Finally, I argue that by focusing on Dostoevsky's imminent loss of consciousness, The Master of Petersburg compels the reader to inhabit what Dominick LaCapra describes as an intermediary zone between acting out and working through trauma, a zone characterized by the productive dispersal of readerly focus. In so doing, The Master of Petersburg offers a critique of institutional and political modes of reconciliation that, in post-apartheid South Africa, tend to substitute the expediency of institutional justice for the complexity of lived traumatic experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Trauma
• J.M. Coetzee
• Dostoevsky
• South Africa
• unconsciousness
• Jean-Luc Nancy
• Dominick LaCapra

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Writing History, Writing Trauma (LaCapra), “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies” (Hartman), and Testimony (Felman and Laub).

2. See Remembering Trauma (McNally), Trauma: A Genealogy (Leys), and Trauma Culture (Kaplan), among others works.

3. See Postcolonial Witnessing (Craps), Postcolonial Traumas (ed. Ward) and Cultured Violence (Jolly) for approaches that challenge the universality of western trauma theory.

4. For an in-depth discussion of the problems with western trauma theory in relation to South Africa and other non-western nations, see Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma (Rajiva).

5. For more on the limitations of the TRC, see There Was This Goat (Krog, Mpolweni and Ratele) and Ambiguities of Witnessing (Sanders).

6. See The Smell of Apples (Behr), Bitter Fruit (Dangor), and David's Story (Wicomb) for examples of post-apartheid novels that address the topic of apartheid trauma, albeit on more recognizable terrain (South Africa functions as the setting in each novel).

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Notes on contributors

Jay Rajiva

Jay Rajiva is an assistant professor of Global Anglophone Literature at Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA. His work has appeared in journals such as Research in African Literatures, Twentieth-Century Literature, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. He is the author of Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma (Bloomsbury 2017), which examines representations of trauma in fiction of the South African apartheid and the 1947 partition of India.