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there might be a certain degree of awareness in the process of acting out trauma just as at other times working through trauma may occur outside one’s consciousness. Nevertheless, as an attempt to signify trauma, or what Lacan and Žižek call a hole in the chain of signification, Rhys’s novel can be read as a narrative that writes, rather than writes about, historical trauma.
Trauma enters Condé’s novel I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1986) just as abruptly as it usually strikes in real life: her protagonist and narrator, Tituba, is born of an instance of violence when her mother, Abena, is raped by a sailor on the ship taking her to slavery—an episode symbolic of the historical rape and abuse of her entire race. The historical realeme (Brian McHale’s phrase), the real-life person called Tituba, was the only black defendant in the Salem witch trials. Much like Carpentier, who witnessed Haitian slavery by proxy, through his readings, Condé uses her knowledge of the seventeenth-century Anglophone Caribbean and historical documents from the Massachusetts Bay colony to give voice to a historically neglected realeme: the character of Tituba comes to life in her pages as part of an artistic shock chronotope, slavery, whose real-life referent had entirely foreclosed the voices of its victims. Through the workings of Condé’s and her readers’ traumatic imaginations, magical realist writing evokes a shock chronotope by investing it with affect. Symbolically, Tituba becomes the prosopopoeia of a revitalized history, a naming of trauma itself. Violence and magic are ubiquitous in Condé’s narrative. Images of physical violence alternate with unexplainable events: the extraordinary enters the everyday and undermines its coherence, while its affect can quite easily traumatize readers. Scenes of hangings, rape, and torture are balanced in the emotional economy of the narrative by scenes of tenderness, love-making, healing, contemplation, and reflection on human nature. Besides the kind of metamorphoses used by Carpentier, Condé introduces ghosts several times in her narrative, but not as menacing spirits bent on haunting the living as they were in the Gothic literary tradition: magical realist ghosts are friendly, wisdom-dispensing physical entities who can be touched, hugged, and caressed by those who can transcend the ontological barrier between the