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  • In the Name of Trauma:Notes on Testimony, Truth Telling and the Secret of Literature in South Africa
  • Rosalind C. Morris (bio)

Early in her monumental novel, Middlemarch, George Eliot introduces a chapter with a quotation from an unnamed play, wherein two gentlemen exchange reflections on law and society. The first gentlemen remarks that "an ancient land in ancient oracles/Is called 'law-thirsty:' all the struggle there/ Was after order and a perfect rule."1 The quotation in fact comes from a drama that Eliot has imagined, probably based on her readings of the then-recently translated works of Persian law that had come to be known as the Zend Avesta. The referenced "land" in need of legal quenching is Arya (for which we may now substitute an equally vague "West"). But the brief excerpt from an imaginary play is otherwise ambiguous. If the second gentleman responds to the first man's query by stating that the lands seeking law are in fact to be found "in human souls," there is in the reference to a desire for perfect rule a shadow: the specter of an irremediable insufficiency. It remains unclear, in Eliot's text, whether the ancient land finally achieved a state of lawfulness (and entered its own modernity) or whether it matured into the realization that perfect rule is unattainable. In any case, the literary conceit of an already existing play to which Eliot could refer allows her to ground her own critique of those social norms that enjoyed the status of cultural law in her time through an ironically invoked ancient tradition: "A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards."2 As the novel unfolds, it is the perverse adherence to law in the very attempt to transcend custom that ultimately entraps the doomed Dorothea Brooke. Yet of all the forces discerned and described by Eliot in this deeply insightful novel, perhaps none ring so perpetually true as the [End Page 388] specter of a desire for law and for perfect lawfulness—and the menace of absolute formalism that haunts it. For in the totalizations of formalism, justice retreats.

If Shoshana Felman is correct, this desire for law is a historicizable fact, one that assumed specific new dimensions in the twentieth century as a result of the massification and intensification of trauma, partly because of mechanized warfare. For it was during the twentieth century and iconically at the Nuremberg trials, she claims, that legal proceedings became the venue for "adjudicating" responsibility for the traumas of war. According to Felman, the twentieth century saw a convergence of cultural forces, such that highly theatricalized legal trials came to provide a space in which private and collective traumas were connected, in the face of which law itself was brought to crisis. This crisis of law also made trials the venues in which could be enacted large-scale social crises, themselves the function of law's incapacity to generate lawfulness. One may indeed extend Felman's reading to observe that these social crises occur within the aporetic space that inevitably opens between law and lawfulness. In his treatise on the origin of law, Minos, Plato, speaking through the persona of Socrates, argues that law tends to the truth, "the discovery of reality," and thus to the closure of the space between being and representation, albeit one that is dangerously vulnerable to being manipulated by the poet.3 If law was in force, there would be no crime, of course. However, lawfulness, the desire for a law that is not completely in force, is already alienated from its origin and its goal: that perfect law aspired to by Eliot's Aryans.

According to Felman, it was under the extreme circumstances of mass death in modern warfare—the totalized form of an exceptionality that permits the killing normally prohibited by law—that this aporia between law and lawfulness became all too apparent. And it was in relation to this widening gyre, she argues, that the "trial" offered itself as a paradigm for achieving closure. Mass trauma was perhaps the inevitable result of the totalization and modernization of war. But trauma is not merely an...

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