Women writing in contemporary France

Introduction 17
of the human condition. The twentieth century saw the publication of a significant
number of ‘witnessing’ texts, by both men and women, bringing
into the literary domain, for example, the accounts of Holocaust survivors
and AIDS victims. 32 ‘Traumatic experience’ can be understood more
widely, however, to include the loss – the death – of loved ones, abuse
(physical, mental or sexual), terminal illness, exile and experience of collective
tragedies: wars, terrorist attacks, major accidents, natural disasters.
33 Indeed, the currency of the term has led Hal Foster to identify a
general tendency in contemporary culture ‘to redefine experience, individual
and historical, in terms of trauma’, linked to the theoretical and cultural
return of the subject we have discussed above. In trauma discourse,
trauma entails a loss of self, but is at the same time an event that guarantees
the subject – the traumatised subject – as ‘witness, testifier, survivor’. 34
Trauma is, by definition, what cannot be narrated, but, as Victoria Best
shows in her analysis of dreams in Louise L. Lambrichs’s work in the
opening chapter of this volume, narrative can be identified as fundamental
to the process of healing or, at least, to the validation of the traumatic experience.
Analysts of life writing, like Suzette Henke in Shattered Subjects,
value above all the act of writing itself as therapy. 35 Still other theorists
point to the importance of the reader. In Testimony, Shoshana Felman and
Dori Laub address Holocaust witnessing principally, but their sensitive
discussion of the problematics of listening to – and reading – testimonial
accounts can inform more widely. 36 The point of bearing witness is to communicate
the experience or event, and thus the listener has to take responsibility
as ‘the enabler of the testimony’ (p. 58). In the healing process, the
listener/reader is likewise crucial to this process as ‘an addressable other ..
. who can hear the anguish of one’s memories and thus affirm and recognize
their realness’ (p. 68).
Felman and Laub do not deny, however, that reading harrowing
accounts of traumatic loss is risky – to the reader and to the writer. Not only
does the witness, therapeutically, need the listener or reader to enable the
testimony and to validate the account, but also the interpretation of the
reader is needed, textually, to make the text meaningful. Indeed, if trauma
is literally unspeakable – if it cannot be narrated – then the reader must
locate it in the gaps, in the ellipses, in the metaphors and images, rather
than in the story that is being told. In this volume, Kathryn Robson shows
how the figure of the female vampire in Chantal Chawaf ’s Vers la lumière
gives voice to the unspeakable loss of the narrator’s mother as, elsewhere, she
reads the trauma of childhood sexual abuse in the fragmentary aesthetics of