Haunted Narratives: Life Writing in an Age of Trauma by Gabriele Rippl etal. (review)

The scholarly disciplines of life-writing and trauma studies have forged an important relationship over the past half a century. Individual and communal traumas such as entrenched inequality and discrimination, poverty, illness and injury, abuse and neglect, war/conflict, and genocide have been taken up by writers, artists, and filmmakers in life-narrative texts across different genres and media. In the twenty-first century, amid a deepening awareness of past and present traumas across the globe, life-writing scholars (notably Leigh Gilmore, Rosanne Kennedy, and Gillian Whitlock) have engaged closely with interdisciplinary scholarship to consider the cultural work of autobiographical iterations of trauma, and more particularly the ways that such texts negotiate the practical/creative, linguistic, and ethical terrain of representing pain and suffering.

Haunted Narratives: Life Writing in an Age of Trauma enters this dialogue aiming to provide “new insights into how individuals and communities across time and space deal with traumatic experiences and haunting memories.” Context is significant to this book’s inquiry: the editors and authors of Haunted Narratives primarily come from European contexts (the essays come from a collaborative seminar between philosophy and literary/cultural studies scholars from the universities of Tartu and Berne), and their aim is to foreground experiences and texts that may not previously have come to the attention of academic readers. Further, as a result of workshopping, these essays are often interlinked and speak overtly to each other. This shows a clarity of collective goals for the volume and provides a helpful narrative thread for the reader to follow.

These case studies reveal the myriad ways that trauma is represented across texts, cultures, and time. Though many of the essays focus on literary examples, other essays also open a dialogue on genre and offer different types (sub-genres) of life narrative. For example, Leena Kurvet-Käossar’s “Voicing Trauma in the Deportation Narratives of Baltic Women” looks at written and oral testimony, Stefanie Preuss in “Metaphors for Scots Today” writes on documentary and biographical plays, and other authors write on texts at the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction.

The central thread in these literary and theoretical analyses is the notion of “hauntings,” and this idea also features prominently in humanities trauma scholarship. Traumas of the past are a lingering spectre in the present, and the editors refer to the significance of “transgenerational hauntings” (Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok’s notion) to this collection. Life-writing texts so often record and reveal traumatic experiences from the past – haunting or demanding attention in the present and insisting that historical records be redrawn. Hauntings are also about the Derridean idea of spectrality – the persistence of haunting figures, such as ghosts, which evade representation. How can literary and cultural texts represent trauma and ethically negotiate the difficulties of doing so? The essays in this volume are preoccupied with the limits of representation and life writing: what can be written about trauma, when, and how? The volume is strongly informed by the theoretical disciplines vital to both trauma studies and life-writing scholarship: literary and cultural studies, cultural memory, psychoanalysis, gender studies, philosophy, and post-colonial studies.

Haunted Narratives is a significant collection, and it makes an important contribution to the interdisciplinary scholarship in humanities trauma studies. The essays illuminate the ways in which life writings so often bring marginal texts or voices into the public domain and in doing so demonstrate the political agency of literary and cultural representations. In looking back to times of conflict and political repression, life writings, and indeed the scholars who explore these texts, reveal the potential power of remembering and recording lives as a means of revising histories and engaging with the conflicts of the present.