Clairvoyant bodies: Bodily anachrony and trauma in contemporary north American fiction

Lacunae are common currency in trauma fiction. Whether taking the shape of cognitive ellipses or intergenerational blockages, the gaps in which testimony ought to be present proliferate in literature representing traumatic experience. Accompanying the linguistic and structural lacunae in trauma literature, however, is a prevalent narrative phenomenon in which a fictional body registers the physical, psychic, and spiritual suffering centralized in a particular text. In these cases, embodied sensations such as nausea, suffocation, loss of consciousness, and even arousal testify to the painful realities of individuals and communities that cannot and have not been overtly disclosed. Contributing to substantiated work on feminist narratology, my research also offers one possible approach to the development of a racial narratology by investigating the formal and temporal intricacies of texts in which the primary moments of unprocessed and unnarrated traumatic rupture are the result of patriarchal white supremacist practices. In my investigation of fictional texts from the 20th and 21st centuries in North America, I establish a repeated pattern in which the texts' central traumas and their social and psychic meaning are narrated non-verbally through cues or gestures embedded in the plot—what I call bodily anachrony. For a reader to engage ethically with a text, then, these non-verbal methods of narration, in concert with the reader's embodied non-verbal responses, must be parsed alongside the more readily available verbal ones.The opening chapter of this dissertation asks how the asphyxiation suffered by the protagonist of William Faulkner's "Pantaloon in Black" might challenge the unnarratability of the racist trauma of lynching through its anticipation of a violence purposefully withheld from the reader. Building on the discussion of "bodily anachrony" developed in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 on James Baldwin's "Going to Meet the Man" asks how both the sexual arousal and impotence experienced by white deputy Jesse enables readerly access to a narrative of trauma chained to Jesse's repressed childhood experience of anti-Black racist violence. Turning from a focus on the narrative dynamics of race to a focus on gender, I investigate the shadow story of patriarchal self-control made present to the reader through her bodily engagement with fictional self-harm in Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye. The final chapter returns to the concept of shadow story to discuss the possibility for surrogate testimony to the legacy of Canadian residential schools produced through the disembodied presence of ghosts in Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach.

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