|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
sorts; and yet, the repetition of violent images (by the media or other means) does tend to create a spatio-temporality in its own right and, in a way, “authentic” experiences from the audience’s point of view. A spectator (viewer, listener, or reader) will thus develop what Thomas Elsaesser calls a “prosthetic memory” and, on a case-by-case basis, “prosthetic trauma,” which will result in a subconscious overlap of different temporalities in the spectator’s perception of reality: “Besides involving repetition and iteration, the traumatic event intimately links several temporalities, making them coexist within the same perceptual or somatic field, so much so that the very distinction between psychic time and chronological time seems suspended” (“Postmodernism as Mourning Work” 197). Other theorists have shared this point of view in the past few years as well, initiating a meaningful dialogue about the legitimacy and sources of secondary witnessing and vicarious traumatization, ultimately leading toward analyses of literary works as trauma work. In 2005, for instance, E. Ann Kaplan argued that “the reader or viewer of stories or films about traumatic situations may be constituted through vicarious or secondary trauma” and that “most of us most of the time experience trauma in the ‘secondary’ rather than direct position” (39). This line of inquiry is not altogether new; Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Ellul, Paul Virilio, and Slavoj Žižek, to name only a few, have already discussed the impact of visual media on both the individual and the collective consciousness in different types of arguments and contexts (not all trauma-related) for more than two decades. Etiologically, however, visually mediated trauma is not the only type of psychic wounding; among other sources of trauma, Kaplan also mentioned “reading a trauma narrative and constructing visual images of semantic data…” (91). I claim that vicarious traumatization is not always solely the result of reading a trauma narrative but also—and more important from a literary-artistic perspective—the cause for writing one.
Magical realism, as a mode of writing and not as a canonical genre restricted to a certain geography, culture, or literary trend, has become one of the most effective, albeit controversial, artistic media to re-present extreme events since its beginnings in the early twentieth century.