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but of what was experienced as happening. The traumatic imagination transforms individual and collective traumatic memories into narrative memories and integrates them into an artistic shock chronotope.
Shock chronotopes are prone to reveal the intrinsically uncanny reality of traumatic events—histories that were and were not at the same time: they were, because more or less verifiable facts may attest their taking place; and they were not, because none of the events ever came to be stored in a coherent narrative memory, having eluded, at the very moment of its occurrence, the subject’s cognitive capabilities. Even if an event looks or sounds unreal, it has nevertheless come into being in a realistic context with real causes. As strange as the world of unfamiliar phenomena might seem at first glance, its simultaneous perception as familiar intriguingly suggests that it is, in fact, not a parallel universe or a world “beyond” but very much part and parcel of our “real” reality. Consequently, while a chronotope may seem quite real, its flicker (caused by repressed memories) will still convey strangeness and fear—the combination that makes the mind hesitate, delay its responses, and plunge into a state of uncertainty.
Magical realism, as a mode of textual representation, gives traumatic events an expression that traditional realism could not, seemingly because magical realist images and traumatized subjects share the same ontological ground, being part of a reality that is constantly escaping witnessing through telling. Coping with an extreme state of uncertainty, as in an experience of the uncanny, is also characteristic of dealing with trauma. Whether the author is a primary witness of the extreme event or not, chances are that readers become secondary or tertiary witnesses of sorts, and possibly vicariously traumatized by the narrated events. However, being traumatized by proxy is not the same as being a victim: by transgressing the boundaries of verisimilitude, the magical realist text may both convey the authors’ empathy (through their narrators and/or characters) and at the same time induce empathy on the part of the readers—not by appropriating the victims’ voices but, rather, by making them heard for the first time. And even if the extreme events which the text re-creates can be neither understood nor represented (in the