ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates the relationship between physical locale, cognition, and trauma in Siddhartha Deb’s An Outline of the Republic and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, using animist relationality to provide the material enactment of Michael Rothberg’s conception of the implicated subject: one who may benefit from systems that impose trauma on marginalized groups, but who is not a perpetrator, and more involved than a bystander. Amrit Singh, the narrator of Deb’s novel, follows a quest trajectory modeled loosely on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, ostensibly to find a story worthy of his assignment to the local paper, but increasingly driven by the photograph of a mysterious woman abducted by insurgents near the border between Burma (now Myanmar) and the Indian state of Manipur. Conversely, in The Lowland, the murder of Udayan, a Naxalite activist, is the focal point of trauma for Udayan’s wife Gauri, and brother Subhash, who eventually marry and move to the US but who continue to be haunted by Udayan’s presence in their lives. Traumatic experience cracks and splits through the problematic frame of unity – a wholeness of being pursued by each novel’s characters, who move through disparate spaces, seeking a kind of Cartesian perceptual unity that is undone by the heterogenous experience of trauma. Traumatic movement, in other words, invokes animist relation, a representation that compels the reader to imbue each text with animist spirituality. The trauma text, in other words, must be read for its insurgence, its willingness to move from an ordered account of suffering to an animist lifeworld of storied matter.
