ABSTRACT
In this chapter I examine the way traumatic memory can be accessed through Freud’s mechanism of deferred action (Nachträglichkeit) in regard to two literary works by Marguerite Duras. I first analyze Hiroshima mon amour, and through it discuss Cathy Caruth’s interpretation of Freud, and then move to The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein to show the implications of trauma in everyday life. Whereas both works show how a traumatic event is repressed although it is available to consciousness, I argue that the second work clearly demonstrates that one cannot access the original event through memory but rather through repetition, and that this repetition creates and enables its origin no less than it is enabled by it. Moreover, it is precisely the non-therapeutic value of Lol V. Stein’s repetition that makes it closer to the repetition of modern everyday life as “post-traumatic” in general, whereas the repetition of the French woman in Hiroshima mon amour refers to a specific and contingent trauma.
