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Establishing a nexus between magical realist writing (viewed primarily as a postmodern literary phenomenon) and trauma (understood as an individual and as an often invisible cultural dominant) requires an interdisciplinary conceptual tool; the term that I propose, “traumatic imagination,” is intended to describe an empathy-driven consciousness that enables authors and readers to act out and/or work through trauma by means of magical realist images. I posit that the traumatic imagination is responsible for the production of many literary texts that struggle to re-present the unpresentable and, ultimately, to reconstruct events whose forgetting has proved just as unbearable as their remembering. The traumatic imagination is also the essential consciousness of survival to which the psyche resorts when confronted with the impossibility of remembering limit events and with the resulting compulsive repetition of images of violence and loss.
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The concept of trauma has evolved from its original meaning of physical injury to that of psychological disorder and, more recently, to that of cultural phenomenon. In my analyses of four violent historical events—slavery, colonialism, the Holocaust, and war—I refer to these flickering time-space indicators as “shock chronotopes,” borrowing the term “chronotope” (time-space) from Mikhail Bakhtin and adding the “shock” component in the sense it carried in “shell-shock,” the World War I phrase for what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). When the overwhelming violence of an event prevents it from being rationalized and archived in the subject’s consciousness as it occurs, the traumatic time-space (the shock chronotope) is so shaky that making it artistically visible (turning it into an artistic chronotope) requires an act of imagination, which I call traumatic. Magical realist writing should be regarded not as an escape from horrific historical “facts” or as a distortion meant to make them more cognitively or emotionally palatable but rather as one of the most effective means of re-creating, transmitting, and ultimately coping with painful traumatic memories. In such a context, the re-presented or reconstructed truth will not be of what actually happened