Narration and the Fiction of Trauma

As stated previously, trauma studies deal with traumatic events, their reasons, and their impacts on the human. As trauma studies are mostly about the preconscious experiences coming to the conscious, they appear randomly in the consciousness as they are remembered or visited upon encountering or experiencing an event, a person, or a thing that makes a person recall a past traumatic event. It is for this reason that traumatic events do not appear in a chronological order in the consciousness. As Weber argues

[t]he past remains something that informs the present. But how does this happen?

The traumatic subject becomes dislodged from the chronological passing of time by virtue of the continuation of social life. The traumatic event, therefore, moves through time within the subject who experienced it. (Weber, 2015: 31)

For Weber, then, a traumatic event appears in the consciousness of a person without rupturing the chronological real passing of time: there is no break in the real passing of time; however, when one remembers a traumatic experience, the chronological passing of time and, therefore, the chronological sequence of events are ruptured in the mind of the individual. The same idea is propounded in its relation to postcolonialism by Martinez-Falquina:

The fact that in the postcolonial world time is not necessarily understood as linear or based on cause-effect relations has also been emphasized to question the idea of traumatic atemporality […]. (2016: 127)

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To elaborate the idea more, one can say that the postcolonial world time cannot be detached from its past and future: that is, past, present, and future are interrelated in the postcolonial world. It is due to the experiences pertaining to the colonial times people suffer from that they criticise colonialism in the present day and that they foreshadow their future and guide the people-of-the-future about the injustice of colonialism. As Martinez-Falquina argues, “in many postcolonial cultures the past, present and future are not considered separate but part of “a unified tangle”,” (127): it is for this reason that traumatic colonial experiences appear in the present day of people and rupture their own chronological passing of time when remembered or revisited. Since they are always in connection with the present days of people, they are atemporal in the sense that there is no specific time for them to appear: they can be recalled any time, either in the present day or in the future. Thus, one cannot talk of chronological sequence in the passing of time in the mind of an individual when one considers traumatic experiences.

Narrativization of these traumatic experiences cannot always be chronological, therefore.

Upon looking at the novel, one can discern that the narration of the novel is broken in relation to the narrativization of the traumatic experiences of characters. As the postcolonial analysis of the novel suggests, the trauma of the characters, especially of Alice, is engendered due to colonial reasons to help the settlers in the colony beside some economic and social problems experienced in the years of the Great Depression.

The silence and alienation of Alice reflect her trauma, as she expresses as follows:

Emily taught me to be humble, be grateful, never look them in the eyes. Cross your fingers behind your back, untell the lie. But although this helped me to survive, it began to rebound on me. I became confused. Is this my truth or theirs?

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I had to create my own place where I could rely upon myself. (Fletcher, 1996:

201)

In the orphanage, Alice behaves in a way that she needs to act against her character;

Emily teaches Alice how to survive in the orphanage: she does not need to be sincere, yet acting in a way that she is humble causes self-alienation: she is alienated from her own self as such an act begins to rebound on her and she gets confused about the values, so she states she needs to create a place that is sincere, which also brings forth her alienation from the orphanage and the ruling and education system there. This alienation is traumatic for her, and it affects her future life. She not only silences but also alienates herself from the people around her who are either in Britain or in New Zealand. Her trauma results from her longing for her mother and motherland. Kaleidoscope, as the medium to reflect Alice’s past memories, exposes different and separate events in the preconscious. Each colour and smell in the kaleidoscope represent for different people and events, and each colour and smell do not appear in a chronological sequence in the chronological passing of time, which also underscores the non-linear appearance of traumatic preconscious memories in the conscious. Likewise, narration is also ruptured:

events are narrativized by three different narrators, Alice, her daughter Joy, and her niece Isobel, who explain different sides of the same events in the novel with their own conceptions. The existence of different narrators explaining the same events on different pages of the novel reflects the non-linearity and atemporality of traumatic events. To illustrate, the class system in England is criticized by Alice, who states that it is brainwashing to distinguish the readers of books as the ones coming from titled families, that is from aristocrats, and the ones not coming from titled families (70).

However, when Joy implies that her mother’s rage against the class system is lightweight because deep in herself she divides the people into commoners and aristocrats (55), she highlights that ideas and events can have different meanings for

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different people. As Alice argues, “[w]hat we see depends on where we stand” (229):

events can have their own interpretations when time and place are juggled without chronological barriers (229). One can also give the birth of Joy’s daughter, Marlene, as an example to different understandings of events: Joy argues that Alice and she have different perceptions of the baby born out-of-wedlock, and she has to make herself heard by Marlene as Alice does (107). That is, ideas or events can be explained by Alice with her own perception and by her daughter Joy with a different one. Then this type of broken narrativization with multiple narrators reflects the non-linearity and atemporality of past traumatic events which can appear in the conscious at any time when remembered, and it also reveals that each event can be interpreted in a different way by each character, so there cannot be one single interpretation of an event.

The idea should also be expounded in its relation to postcolonialism and transculturalism. Transcultural novels, as the adjective suggests, describe the concerns of both the home and host cultures: they do not focus on one nation and one culture;

instead, they reflect characters who suffer from being a part of two different cultures and who are either positively or negatively affected from having a split but at the same time a hybrid nature, as elaborated in the analysis of Janet Frame’s Towards Another Summer. That is, they reflect “multiple attachments, to the homeland and host land”

(Mullaney, 2010: 7). Therefore, postcolonial novels, which are also transcultural novels as they delineate the discrepancies and similarities between two different cultures, offer alternatives to their readers: there cannot be only one version of the truth, but there are alternatives.

Transcultural narration not only emerges from and combines different cultural traditions; it also highlights and struggles with its own transcultural content.

Together with a situation of unreliable narration, the transcultural novel, with its

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deep currents of doubt, represents the transcultural qualities of modern life far better than narrative patterns claiming absolute authority about truth and identity.

(Helff, 2009: 87)

As argued by Helff, a transcultural piece of fiction offers its readers alternatives to only one truth; its narration also illustrates different options and variations of the truth by focusing on different sides of only one event. It is for this reason that there are multiple narrators in this novel to depict especially Alice’s and Joy’s understandings of an event.

Therefore, the word unreliability in the quotation above can be explained in a way that there are different narrators reflecting their own versions of events with their own understandings.