ABSTRACT

The structures through which trauma underlies writing are more often seen in testimonies, in accounts by people who have witnessed terrible events. One good example of a fiction about trauma that uses the historical record is Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, a foundational text for postcolonial studies which perhaps, as Kafka does, foreshadows much in the twentieth century. Heart of Darkness is a demanding literary novella, and some critics have argued or even assumed that trauma can only be represented in complex, challenging and, even perhaps, modernist or postmodernist forms. The reader’s appropriation of a fictional trauma is more subtle. It is always possible to “work through” or appropriate a fiction and in so doing, simply pass over and appropriate a trauma. The very framework of the fiction and closure works to resolve the trauma. And this pertains to the most important question, perhaps, about trauma, the possibility of healing.