Trauma and Fiction

To fully understand the relationship between alienation and fiction in this novel, the novel should be expounded within the context of trauma studies as alienation stems from characters’ traumatic experience of their being perceived or their perceiving themselves as Other.

comparison between dreams and literary works, claims that when a writer “depict[s] his heroes’ state of mind” in his literary works (Freud, 1976: 1813), he also depicts his own, conscious or unconscious, state of mind as a real character through his fictional characters and his career as a writer (1842-1853). In this dissertation, Isobel’s relation to fiction is deliberately excluded as it is out of the scope of postcolonialism.

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Concerning the physical and psychological consequences of a dreadful event, trauma studies deal with such concepts as physical injuries, wounds, and illness, and also psychological breakdowns, detachment, and alienation, which are engendered from a specific stressful event or from a combination of disquieting events, such as war, death of a loved one, and immigration. The reasons for trauma is explicitly summarized by Tony Jaffa as “the physical and psychological effects of torture,” “death of family or friends,” “uncertainty about the fate of family or friends,” “the loss of all that is familiar in the country of origin,” “life in a strange place with different language, culture, and climate,” “economic hardships,” “life as asylum seekers with limited rights and an uncertain future,” and “ having work skills and training which are not recognized or needed” (1993: 717). In a way, a traumatic experience can be caused by a reason that stems from an external event that disrupts the physical and/or psychological health of a person. However, it is not only an external reason or a combination of external reasons that engenders trauma in a human being; it is also the protracted inner disturbances which the human being suffers from. “Traumatic feelings and perceptions, then, come not only from the originating event but also from the anxiety of keeping it repressed.”

(Alexander, 2012: 10) The traumatic experience of Alice, the protagonist of The Silicon Tongue by Beryl Fletcher, stems not only from such external factors as physical and psychological torture she experiences in the orphanage, the knowledge of the so-called death of her birth mother, being away from her own mother, from her teacher as her mother’s substitute, and also from Britain as her motherland, her life in New Zealand as a strange place, economic hardships, but also from the uncertainty about the fate of her birth mother, longing for the mother and the teacher as well as the motherland as repressed inner disturbances that she does not vocalize much until her revelations of her colonial and postcolonial experiences to an interviewer. Thus, the revelations serve as means for overcoming trauma as they are the links between her traumatic experiences

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stemming from colonial and postcolonial encounters and the fictional world she later finds herself in either through the book or through the game in which her stories from the past are unravelled.

As trauma studies are primarily concerned with past memories and stories of a person who undergoes external and inner disturbances, these past memories and stories that shape the present life of a person are repeatedly visited and recalled in the healing process of the sufferer. To be more precise, they are visited to recover from the sense of longing for the missed people or places or to find a way to find and express the self that is either torn, silenced, isolated, alienated, or even forgotten under patriarchal Western humanism that regards the Western man as anthropocentric. Touching upon the connection between collective and individual identity in his Trauma: A Social Theory (2012), Jeffrey Alexander succinctly highlights two sides of traumatic experience: one that bothers and the other that positively affects the sufferer (26); that is for Alexander, painful traumatic experiences shape the identity of the sufferer, either collective or individual, and by revisiting the past memories and stories “[i]dentities are continuously constructed and secured” (Alexander, 2012: 26). To relate the argument to the novel, Alice visits her stories from the past when she talks to the interviewer Wendy. Even before talking to Wendy, she still remembers the past through her special technique, which is encoding the past memories to certain colours in a kaleidoscope; that is, the kaleidoscope and her interview with Wendy have the same function for Alice: her frequent visits to the past memories and facing up to them by grasping the underlying reasons heal her as they remind her of her lost mother and motherland. Here it will be appropriate to note that remembering the lost mother and motherland are painful experiences that bother her. However, as remembering is her deliberate act, it is in fact a healing process for her in the sense that she keeps her memories alive and makes a connection between her past and present, through which she overcomes her alienation

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stemming from her forced immigration to New Zealand; the past memories, therefore, makes her remember her mother, her motherland, and the reason why she is sent to New Zealand: she is sent to New Zealand due to economic problems Britain suffers from. By remembering these and by understanding the real reasons of her being sent to a colony, Alice has an opportunity to overcome her longing for her mother and motherland. To be more precise, her alienation from her mother stems from being away from her. When she is away from her, she criticizes the mother as she thinks her mother deliberately leaves her, so she alienates herself from her mother and wishes her tutor Miss Catley is her mother. However, this alienation from the mother is not a continuous act or feeling because she also longs for her at the same time. While growing up, however, her kaleidoscope is a medium for her to come to terms with her mother. As she states,

“[she] ha[s] total recall of every important conversation and event that has shaped [her]

life” thanks to the kaleidoscope (Fletcher, 1996: 2); and by means of these past memories she recalls, she fulfils her longing for her lost mother as she states in the following:

Every night of my life, no matter how tired I am, I re-experience my stories. Not as anecdotes but as feelings. I transfer the work of the mind into the storehouse of the body. I retell the stories my mother told me about my birth. I relive her pain, her ignorance, her misguided love. Did you know that smells have colours too?

My mother’s smell is in the gold bead, cigarette smoke, gin, beige powder. For the first year in the orphanage I was allowed to keep the pink eiderdown and every night I sniffed her presence in the cloth. (50)

As the quotation suggests, the memory of her lost mother is kept alive thanks to recalling the past via her special technique, which is a kaleidoscope that reflects different patterns each time when looked at it. Thanks to this technique, she situates her

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mother in her long-term memory as she aims at recalling her mother by keeping her memory alive; that is, Atkinson and Shiffrin’s argument on recalling an image or a memory keeps it alive (Eysenc and Keane, 2005: 193), and this is true for Alice. In this sense, the kaleidoscope is the concrete metaphor of her memory that is visited at different times and that makes her relive the past memories, especially of her mother.

To elaborate the kaleidoscope metaphor, it can be asserted that kaleidoscope is a means to reflect Alice’s desires to be close to her mother. Sigmund Freud argues in

“Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” (1976) that “objectively speaking, birth is a separation from the mother”⁴⁸ (Freud, 1976: 4287), and after birth as the first separation from the mother, people can experience this separation in different ways in their lives.

One of the ways to experience this separation is the physical separation from the mother when the person is a child, as in the case of Alice, who is given to an orphanage by her mother, Elva, in the novel. However, such separation brings forth the sense of “missing someone who is loved and longed for” (4292). It is for this reason that Alice smells the eiderdown that has the mother’s own odour on it; and by smelling an object having her mother’s odour, Alice tries to lessen the sense of missing caused by the physical absence of her mother. In this act of recalling the mother, therefore, kaleidoscope turns out to be a medium for her to reach the mother psychologically though not physically.

In Freudian terms then, the kaleidoscope is the “preconscious” of Alice because Alice’s

“visual thinking” or visual thoughts in the kaleidoscope can be “word-processed” or

“word-presented”, that is, they can come to the conscious and be uttered (3956). In Lacanian terms, Alice is in search of the oneness or unity with her mother. To be

48 The idea is later developed by the psychoanalyst Jacque Lacan, who claims that a human being loses her/his unity with the mother after being born; and to reach that unity, s/he is in a continuing search that manifests itself in different phases of human life, such as in the Imaginary and in the Symbolic.

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clearer, for Jacques Lacan, a child is in unity with the mother in her womb, and after being born s/he loses that unity; and the steps to individuation, the Mirror Stage and the Symbolic, do not fulfil the sense of unity with the mother, as also stated by Hans Bertens: “this loss of our original state results in desire, in an unspecific but deepfelt longing that can never be fulfilled, but can only (temporarily) satisfy itself with symbolic substitutes” (Bertens, 2007: 127). The substitute of her mother is Miss Catley for Alice: Alice’s substituting Miss Catley for her mother is to fulfil the sense of unity and oneness with the mother she longs for. Alice describes her longing for her mother and substituting Miss Catley for her birth mother as follows:

I thought about Miss Catley night and day, I wove a fantasy around her. Miss Catley was my real mother. Elva Smallacomb, the woman who had abandoned me, had stolen me away from Miss Catley when I was a new-born. For years Miss Catley had searched for me and eventually she found me here at Moncreiff House.

She came here pretending to be a teacher so that she could be close to me. At night, I would picture Miss Catley searching the streets of London in all weathers, looking into the faces of children sleeping rough, knocking at the doors of police stations, going to soup kitchens and night shelters, asking everyone she met, have you seen my little girl, her name is Alice, she’s got long yellow hair, at night I brush it out and make a plait of gold. (Fletcher, 1996: 39)

As understood in the quotation above, a mother is a person who dearly loves her child and shows this love by touching the child and even brushing the child’s hair out.

However, she is not only a caregiver but also the one who shelters the child from the disturbances of the outside world. As proposed by Lacan, a child encounters some turmoils stemming from his/her interaction with others/Other around him/her in the individuation process (Lacan, 1986: 736, 737). The turmoils include the castration

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anxiety, alienation, being otherized, and isolation, which all stem from the interaction and conflict between the individual and others/Other: in “the formation of I” mother pertains to the Freudian “id” thanks to her “lofty” and protective nature as a “remote inner castle” which is “surrounded by marshes and rubbish-tips” (736). The turmoils, marshes and rubbish-tips, help the child in the individuation process, like Alice in the novel, turn back to his/her mother as the child is undifferentiated from the caregiver and protective mother in the womb. As seen in Lacan’s quotation, the close relationship between the mother and the child is explained through the relationship between the mother and the Freudian “id”: id is the domain for instincts, and the “basic instincts”

include “hunger and love” (Freud, 1976: 3752), both of which are fulfilled by the mother, in fact. Before the birth, the mother is the first person fulfilling the basic instincts of the child, and after the birth there is still a close relationship between the mother and the child as the mother is still a caregiver.⁴⁹ As for Alice, therefore, it can clearly be observed that her longing for her mother firstly stems from the traumatic loss of the mother and then from the loss of the derivative of the mother, which is the

49 There is still another relationship between the mother and the child for Freud, and it is explicitly related to the Oedipus Complex: for Freud, girls exhibit a different behaviour than boys in the aftermath of the Oedipus Complex. While boys identify themselves with their fathers to have their masculinity by keeping themselves away from their mothers and repressing their desires to be close to their mothers, girls identify themselves with their mothers to have their femininity (Freud, 1976: 3966). Therefore, they turn back to their mothers and have close relationship with them. However, it should be noted here that as Alice needs and recalls her mother as a caregiver, the relationship between her mother and her is explained without the sexual references pertaining to the Oedipus Complex.

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motherland; for these reasons, for Alice, the kaleidoscope is a tie between the sense of longing and fiction as well as alienation and fiction since it is a medium between what she experiences as a postcolonial character suffering from the effects of colonialism and the fictive book and the game that describe her real-life experiences either with a change in the sequence of events or with the potentiality of some changes in them. That is, the memories coming to the consciousness of Alice thanks to the kaleidoscope take place in fiction: in the book to be published and the cyber-game, both of which centre on her experiences in her real life. Fiction, then, alleviates the traumatic experiences of Alice;

it is a healer for her to make her longing for and alienation from the people around her less severe. As Irene Visser argues in her comment on another New Zealander writer, Patricia Grace, postcolonial literature deals with

the injustices and wrongs of colonialism [that] produce a restless state, in which trauma must be brought to light through narrative. Narrativization is empowering to individuals and their communities, and is in fact crucial cultural survival.

(2016: 14)

In a way, the postcolonial character Alice’s traumatic experience of the loss of the mother, as the first cause of her alienation, is healed through fiction by the book to be published and the cyber-game. Her alienation, then, stems firstly from the separation from the mother: this separation from the mother, as the cause of her further alienation, is due to external reasons, such as economic problems that a lower-class family suffers.

To turn back to the relationship between trauma and fiction which is the healer of a traumatic experience, it can be said that vocalizing the traumatic experience is not always easy for the sufferers, and the idea is propounded by Michael Humphrey in The Politics of Atrocity and Reconciliation: From Terror to Trauma (2005): besides the traumatic experience,

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there is also the difficulty of putting pain into language. Personal suffering has to be put into language to be shared, and narrative is the most common way of establishing meaning (2005:105).

That is, when one vocalizes the traumatic event, s/he may heal: narrativization enables the sufferer to come to an understanding of what s/he experiences and of himself/herself. As Humphrey states, “memory is recovered as an echoing response through repetition or a constant return to the same narrative themes” (105). It is for this reason that fiction, as a means of narrativization, becomes a healer for Alice, who narrates her experiences in her memory to Wendy.

Even before her narrativizations to Wendy, Alice consoles herself with books, and she tries to cope with the loss of mother and motherland by means of fiction: she reads novels a lot (Fletcher, 1996: 12). She explains that the reason why she reads is a way of “comfort” (25), but it is not “escapism” (25) since fiction makes her question not only the harsh conditions she experiences as a child left alone by herself but also the hypocrisy⁵⁰ of colonialism and patriarchy. She states her interest in novels as follows in the novel:

Morry says that my obsession with reading fiction is escapism. Why is this wrong? When I was young, novels gave me a sense that other lives were being lived, far beyond the brute reality of my own. Now that I am tied to the limitations of my failing body, my mind is still free to fly. Imagination is the only mystic journey left for me to make. (Fletcher, 1996: 25)

50 She is said that she is sent to New Zealand to help the settlers there and to have the chance of having good marriage, yet the real reason is that she is seen as redundant as a working-class child without a family to look after her.

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As understood from the quotation, Alice’s enthusiasm for fiction is not due to the wish for escapism or forgetting her traumatic memories; instead, fiction is the tool through which she comes to an understanding of events: her mother has to leave her alone in the orphanage on account of economic hardships (10); she is sent to New Zealand as she is seen redundant (26). As trauma is “far from telling of an escape from reality—the escape from a death, or from its referential force—rather attests to its endless impact on a life” (Caruth, 1996: 7), it is in relation to fiction since both trauma and fiction deal with the consequences of events and their impacts on human beings. Besides its focus on the consequences and impacts of events, trauma is also the cause of understanding the limitations of human beings. When one starts to consider his/her limitations, s/he alienates himself/herself from himself/herself, which is in fact self-alienation. Here in the quotation above, one can clearly see the self-alienation of Alice in the sense that she distances herself from her body: she is aware of the limitations of her body: her body cannot freely fly to the North whenever she wants; it is in fact her mind that flies to the North. That is, she alienates herself from her body in the process of understanding who she is; for this reason, this alienation from the self serves a positive function for her.

Elaborating the idea, Sartre argues that bodies are different from identities; a body is just a “property” rather than a “being” (1984: 402); therefore, organs are different from the real identity for him. Giving the eye as an example, Sartre goes on arguing:

I am the Other in relation to my eye. I apprehend it as a sense organ constituted in the world in a particular way, but I can not “see the seeing”; that is, I can not apprehend it in the process of revealing an aspect of the world to me. Either it is a thing among other things, or else it is that by which things are revealed to me. But it can not be both at the same time. (402)

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What Sartre argues highlights the distance between the abstract notion of self and the concrete form of body: a being, consciousness, or an identity is perceived in embodied forms, but these forms do not reflect the being or the consciousness; in a way, for Sartre, “no matter how constrained its body may be, consciousness always remains free to determine itself and its situation” (Rae, 2011: 27).⁵¹ It is for this reason that bodily forms have limitations; they lack the full representation of ontological being. Therefore, when Alice utters that her mind is free to fly, she follows the Sartrean concept of alienation: she makes a distinction between her body and her consciousness, and she alienates her consciousness from her body. The reason why she alienates her consciousness from her body is that her body has physical limitations and it cannot freely leave New Zealand and go to Britain, her motherland. Therefore, with her body, it is a burden for her to revisit the places where she was grown up, which she misses, and where she feels wholeness with her mother. Her consciousness, however, freely revisits the past and the places where she was grown up, which she misses, and where she feels wholeness with her mother. It is not restricted to physical limitations and to her weak body that cannot travel easily due to her old age. The consciousness, therefore, enables her to be with the mother in a motherland. It is through this alienation that she tends to find solace in fiction; fiction becomes a means for her to fulfil her longing for the mother and the motherland: through fiction, through the books she reads, through the book about her life, and through cyberspace, she is together with her mother, friends, and Miss Catley in her motherland. In a way, the separation from the physical body and revisiting the past through consciousness and mind make her heard and express her past

51 Then Jean-Paul Sartre and Robert Pepperell, who argues that body and mind are not different entities in The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness beyond the Brain (2003), have different perceptions on consciousness.