48.3.morris in The Name of Trauma

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Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 48, Number 3, 2011, pp. 388-416

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in the name of trauma:

notes on testimony, truth telling and the
secret of literature in south africa
Rosalind C. Morris
Early in her monumental novel, Middlemarch, George Eliot introduces a
chapter with a quotation from an unnamed play, wherein two gentlemen
exchange reflections on law and society. The first gentlemen remarks that an
ancient land in ancient oracles/Is called law-thirsty: all the struggle there/
Was after order and a perfect rule.1 The quotation in fact comes from a
drama that Eliot has imagined, probably based on her readings of the thenrecently translated works of Persian law that had come to be known as the
Zend Avesta. The referenced land in need of legal quenching is Arya (for
which we may now substitute an equally vague West). But the brief excerpt
from an imaginary play is otherwise ambiguous. If the second gentleman
responds to the first mans query by stating that the lands seeking law are
in fact to be found in human souls, there is in the reference to a desire for
perfect rule a shadow: the specter of an irremediable insufficiency. It remains
unclear, in Eliots text, whether the ancient land finally achieved a state of
lawfulness (and entered its own modernity) or whether it matured into the
realization that perfect rule is unattainable. In any case, the literary conceit
of an already existing play to which Eliot could refer allows her to ground
her own critique of those social norms that enjoyed the status of cultural
law in her time through an ironically invoked ancient tradition: Awoman
dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.2 As the novel unfolds, it is the perverse adherence to law
in the very attempt to transcend custom that ultimately entraps the doomed
Dorothea Brooke. Yet of all the forces discerned and described by Eliot in
this deeply insightful novel, perhaps none ring so perpetually true as the
comparative literature studies, vol. 48, no. 3, 2011.
Copyright 2011 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.
388
CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 388
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specter of a desire for law and for perfect lawfulnessand the menace of
absolute formalism that haunts it. For in the totalizations of formalism,
justice retreats.
If Shoshana Felman is correct, this desire for law is a historicizable
fact, one that assumed specific new dimensions in the twentieth century as
a result of the massification and intensification of trauma, partly because
of mechanized warfare. For it was during the twentieth century and iconically at the Nuremberg trials, she claims, that legal proceedings became the
venue for adjudicating responsibility for the traumas of war. According
toFelman, the twentieth century saw a convergence of cultural forces, such
that highly theatricalized legal trials came to provide a space in which private and collective traumas were connected, in the face of which law itself
was brought to crisis. This crisis of law also made trials the venues in which
could be enacted large-scale social crises, themselves the function of laws
incapacity to generate lawfulness. One may indeed extend Felmans reading to observe that these social crises occur within the aporetic space that
inevitably opens between law and lawfulness. In his treatise on the origin
of law, Minos, Plato, speaking through the persona of Socrates, argues that
law tends to the truth, the discovery of reality, and thus to the closure of
the space between being and representation, albeit one that is dangerously
vulnerable to being manipulated by the poet.3 If law was in force, therewould
be no crime, of course. However, lawfulness, the desire for a law that is not
completely in force, is already alienated from its origin and its goal: that
perfect law aspired to by Eliots Aryans.
According to Felman, it was under the extreme circumstances of mass
death in modern warfarethe totalized form of an exceptionality that
permits the killing normally prohibited by lawthat this aporia between
law andlawfulness became all too apparent. And it was in relation to this
widening gyre, she argues, that the trial offered itself as a paradigm for
achieving closure. Mass trauma was perhaps the inevitable result of the
totalization and modernization of war. But trauma is not merely an effect,
to be grasped at the level of the individual psyche; it is also the name for a
more general condition of unrepresentability. For Plato, of course, the aporia
between law and lawfulness was also the aporia between a perfect law, which
would be identical with reality, and laws, which were the writings of kings
and wise men.4 A state in which perfect law reigned would have been mute.
It is language, and specifically poetry, that risks departure from law for him,
and that seduces men from their proper tendencies to conform to reality. If, in
the end, law cannot escape its dependency on language, it works by effacing
that dependency. It is thus language that extols its own mimetic properties,
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C OM P A R A T I V E L I T E R A T U R E S T U D I E S
namely poetry, that makes men depart from their truth, according to Plato.
Now, modernity, for Felman, sees the inversion of this ancient but persisting
logic, such that if the trial offers itself as a mechanism of closure, literature
assumes the function of holding open the gap and of making testimony
to nonclosure, or the representation of nonrepresentability, the basis of its
own justice.5 Justice is here understood to exceed both law and lawfulness,
insofar as it pertains to the order of right rather than truth. It responds to
the question of what ought to be rather than how to make what is conform
to what should have been. This is why Plato suspected the poet, for poetry
introduced a third term into the seemingly closed opposition between law
and lawfulness.
If after the long sleep that Platos antithesis between law and literature
induced, literature nonetheless seeped into the modern courtroom via implicit
narratives, it did so only to become the scene of a collapsewhere the bodily
breakdown of the writer marked the site of representations incapacity for
mastery. In the context of the mass death occasioned by World War II,
writes Felman, this collapse signified trauma, and it was here that literature
was rejuvenated as a permanent supplement to the trial, precisely by virtue
of the legal spectacle, in which the demand for closure was felt to be unsupportable and inadequate to the enormity of the traumatic, experiential real.
Felman goes further than this to argue that literary narrative actually informs
the repetitive structure in legal trials and that it is this folding over of the
onestructure into the other, by which the legal trial comes to be inseparable
from the traumatic repetitions of literary and psychoanalytic narrative, that
ensures the continued and intensifying linkage between trauma and the trial
in both juridical and literary space.6
In this article, I do not attempt to engage the question of trauma and
trial at the level of generality and generalizability to which Felman addresses
herself. My task is more modest, namely to read an emergent discourse of
the unnarratable in relation to a certain desire for the law and in terms of a
problematic of naming within a theory of the juridical performative. Ifocus
on these questions as they have arisen in South Africa since the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), in the wake of which, I suggest,
therehas been a split within cultural discourses. On the one hand, there
has been a valorization and institutionalization of narrative testimony as a
primary mechanism for addressing and redressing collective traumas that
areunderstood to be, at least partially, excluded from the domain of recognized representation. This is perhaps most visible in the forms of museology
that have developed over the past decade and a half. On the other hand,
there has emerged an experimental repudiation of both confessional and
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t estimonial aestheticstrategies. This can be seen in both visual and

literary arts that deploy nondisclosure, secrecy, and the theatricalization of
untranslatability as constituent elements of their aesthetic projectsalthough
this article focuses exclusively on literature. These emergent strategies must be
considered against the backdrop of the TRC, which accompanied efforts to
relegitimate the state and the juridical apparatus in the aftermath of apartheid
and as part of a new postcolonial nation-building project chaperoned by the
African National Congress (ANC).
Truth and Reconciliation: The Secret of Testimony and Literature

As already noted, Plato thought law, in its perfected state, was truth; it
needed no reconciliation. Reconciliation emerges as a task only in the space
of a representational failure, of an inadequacy between discourse and the
truth. In many ways, the South African TRC accepted these principles, but
by inscribing its project within a framework that maintained a separationof
truth telling by perpetrators and victims from questions of compensation,
it asserted the ineradicable distinction between law and justice. A new,collectively acknowledged truth could be generated in one set of hearings, and
this alone would constitute a strategy for nation-building insofar as apartheid
had worked by discrediting the knowledges of nonwhite persons, even as
it had deployed techniques of secrecy so as to testify to the inaccessibility of
its own truth for those same minoritized subjects.7 But the insistence that
compensationlimited as it waswould remain a matter distinct from the
adjudication of truth did a different kind of work, testifying to the radical
incommensurability of human suffering to any calculus of monetaryvalueand
any system of exchange. This splitting of truth and compensation nonetheless
took place in a theater that often resembled a court, even in rural areas where
schoolrooms or churches had to provide the venue. (Commissioners were
themselves often advocates or members of the legal and religioushierarchy.)
It did so despite the fact that the commission itself was not a fully juridical
institution. It had no powers to find people innocent, only to elicit a truth
that would liberate individual actors from personal liability. That truth was
apolitical truth insofar as deeds committed in the pursuit of political ends
were to be excluded from the category of crime were not to be treated as
acts for which individual culpability could be assessed; accordingly, the
TRCcould provide amnesty but not clear people of criminal guilt. As many
critics have pointed out, it failed to produce a more substantial political
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truth because it limited itself to the ideological conflict of the apartheid era.
Itfocused on the fight between white supremacist and antiracialist politics
but excluded the history of colonial capitalism and the question of benefit
from its purview, privileging instead a perpetrator/victim paradigm within
which the question of the beneficiary could not be asked.8
Quite simply, the TRC mimicked the structure of a legal trial without
being one and without entirely relinquishing the paradigm of the trial. The
confusion that this mimicry caused among those who sought to testify at the
TRC is a dimension of the process that has not been adequately addressed.
Not infrequently, perpetrators who were seeking amnesty, mistook their
task at the TRC as a demonstration of their innocence rather than an admission of their overdetermined guilt. In some of the cases that I have examined
in the gold-mining region near Johannesburg, this misrecognition appears to
have been informed at least partially by assumptions about how trials work
that had been gleaned from police procedural television and Hollywood narrative dramas.9 Misrecognizing the TRCs amnesty hearings for real trials,
these young perpetrators suffered the consequences of being in a venue
that could not adjudicate personal crime. They were elsewhere than law.
Iwould like to argue that they were in a domain that is closest (without being
identical) to literature, but in order to make thisclaimafewpreliminaries
are necessary.
Literature, as I understand it, following Derrida, is a strange institution
in which a speaking can occur that comes from no place in particular and
that cannot be assigned to any individual speaker, even when it can be said
to come from a character.10 All language exceeds all speakers, of course, but
literature avows this and makes of this avowal a raison dtre. I will return
to this issue below, but for now, let us simply remark that the strange institution of literature produces a gap between the world and the texta gap
that is never absolute, always unstable, and eternally under attack. To the
extent that the TRC made amnesty contingent on the demonstration that
individual acts were motivated by political forces external to the individual,
and to the extent that it demanded, at the same time, that the speakers in
the hearings demonstrate their lack of mastery over the discourse that had
captured them, it placed them in a position analogous (not identical) to that
of a character in a drama written elsewhere. Indeed, for many, the entire
process appeared to be stage-managed. This anxiety about stage management
fails to grasp the enormous if somewhat transient productivity of the TRC
in the South African national consciousness, but it also, if inadvertently,
grasps a crucial dimension of the scene, namely the affinity between victims
testimony and literature. It is no wonder that Jane Taylors play Ubu and the
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Truth Commission, very successfully produced by William Kentridge and the

Handspring Puppet Company, is largely comprised of verbatim transcripts
from the hearings themselves.11 If the production itself worked to alienate
these words from their point of origin in real historical space, thereby doing
the work of art, the script itself limns the boundary between the real of testimony and the unreal of theater precisely because the context for eliciting the
former was already structured by principles analogous to those of literature,
even though misrecognized in the image of the trial.
It has, of course, been widely remarked that the TRC selected possible participants in the TRC on the basis of their capacity to conform to
overdetermined narratives about political violence, the TRC having as its
mandate a redemption of the state and a renarration of national history in
terms of the fight against apartheid. The burden of such a project fell, it
is said, particularly onerously on women, who often suppressed their own
psychic loss and suffering within narratives that privileged the corporeal
wounds endured by their sons, husbands, and fathers.12 But this critique
risks implying a kind of template narrative and suggests that repetitiveness
in testimony was embraced. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
Excluded testimony was not simply testimony that told the wrong story; it
was also testimony that was inadequately singular. To give but one example,
a group of young men testifying at the Potchefstrom hearing were denied
amnesty because their discourse was too coherent. Each spoke lines that
the others spoke, and indeed, their respective testimonies appeared virtually interchangeable, as though rehearsed using a script (a legal student
had helped them write their affidavits in prison, and they had practiced
them in advance). In an otherwise confused and confusing hearing about
youth violence in the mining communities of the West Rand, this excess of
uniformity in their account made them appear inauthentic to the commission and rendered their claim to truth dubious. Hence, they were denied
amnesty but also denied the opportunity to demonstrate their innocence.
At stake was the form of appearance of the truth and not simply the referent of discourse.
The point here is that if testimony is to function in the service of a justice that is understood to exceed law, it must perform singularity in order to
assert the incommensurability of the event and the logics of reconciliation by
which trial law operates. What is anathema in this context is the formulaic
utterance, the slogan, language bereft of poesis, language as mere instrument.
At the same time, however, the language that works in this context must
also not appear to be excessive; it cannot appear to have added anything.
Hence, the representational burden that falls on testimony in contexts like
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the TRC is to appear coextensive with the real of which it is the suffering
guardian. It must therefore communicate a representational insufficiency.
And this insufficiency cannot be overcome. For every revelation, testimony
must announce that it is also the bearer of an ineradicable secret. It is perhaps
for this reason that the telling of secrets provided such a powerful dramaturgy
for the TRC. How else to explain the beguiling power of the perpetrators
hearings, in which the careful narration of abuse, torture, and assassination
fixated audiences to a greater degree than the accounts of disappearances,
loss, and suffering did at the victims hearings? One may speculate that the
perpetrators hearings permitted the illusory consolation that the secret
was being revealed, whereas in the victims hearings, the suffering was
already known or at least familiar to those who had endured it. And yet
no speech could ever be adequate to it for either the sufferers or those who
would attend their words. The TRC thus staged a split between testimony
as disclosure or reconciliation with the truth, on the one hand, and, as the
announcement of an infinite distance between truth and representation, on
the other. This split might be phrased in terms of the secret as something
to be told counterposed to that which one tells without revealing.
Now, the inadequacy of language to the event that is narrated in a trial
or a truth commission does not in any way inhibit its telling. But there are at
least two kinds of telling that arise from this inadequacy. One is the repetitive and compulsive telling that occurs in situations classified as trauma by
psychoanalysis, those situations in which stimuli have overwhelmed what
Freud, in a palpably material idiom, imagined as the protective shield of
the consciousness.13 The result, as we know, is a certain short-circuiting of
memory, such that the event cannot be contained in the past but demands
instead a re-presencing, one that ruptures the envelope of resistances that
would otherwise transform it into a trace structure.14 Memory does not
return to this past event; rather, the event returns again and again to the
present. Trauma, as such, is the failure of memory and the failure of representation. In the face of this excessive presence, which constantly threatens
the subject with the death of an eternal present, one can believe that the
taskof psychoanalysis and/or of the trialis the mastery, and hence the
displacement of the event in discourse and more specifically in the discourse
that is historicization. In such cases, narration would not so much recover
the past as it would effect a certain and indeed necessary temporal displacement, separating the subject and the event of his or her experience (and
accomplishing in the psyche what aesthetic judgment accomplishes for the
Kantian subject confronted by sublimity but in the idiom of the everyday
rather than art).
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Seen but Not Heard: The Double Bind of Subalternity

This structure is enormously complicated in contexts where trauma has
beencompounded by the blockage of access to those theaters of language in
which time past could be contained as such. In South Africa, for many years,
those who were subject to the traumatizing violence of the apartheid state
had access neither to the therapeutic scenario nor to the trial at which they
could access a different language of mastery and hence a recognition that
worked less by mobilizing the necessary gap between event and representation
than by promising a kind of closure through commensuration. The demand
for truth-telling in trial is only preliminary to the process of judging, and
this judging is inseparable from the weighing, or accounting, of two sets of
sufferingthat of the victim (a suffering past) and that of the perpetrator
(asuffering to come), who, as it were, must be made to pay. This being made
to pay is a feature of both criminal and civil trials, though in the latter, the
payment is reduced to the metaphor of the monetary. Whether criminal
or civil, the trial rests on a system of knowledge production that works on
the basis of an opposition between concealment and revelation, veiling and
unveiling, secreting and disclosing. In the transcripts of the TRC,which,
to repeat, was not a trial but rather mimicked its form and promised its
consolation, one can see the two forms of telling converging on each other,
such that the (always inadequate) narration of trauma is conflated with the
telling of truth. In other words, the telling of stories was asked to take the
form of revealing secretsand this despite the fact that, as I have said, for
most people who had endured the inequalities of apartheid, there were few
secrets to be told, even when there was unspeakable suffering to be narrated. In any case, what is the truth of trauma? Is it not, rather, that which,
by definition, exceeds any and every knowledge? To be traumatized is to be
in a predicament of not being able know and of not being able to transform
what one does not know into a form of telling that appears like revelation.
And yet people came to tell their stories. The thousands of pages in the
archives of the TRC attest to this fact. Moreover, in the aftermath of the
TRC, the telling of stories came to function as a mechanism for addressing
a trauma that had, under apartheid, consisted at least partly in the exclusion from a sphere of representability. This nonrepresentability should
not be confused with invisibility, however. Indeed, fetishistically invested
visibility is often the corollary of political nonrepresentability. A complex
structure of containment ensures this. Thus, political nonrepresentability
frequently takes the form of a demand that excluded persons appear only
insofar as they signify themselves as members of an excluded classa racial
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or gendered minorityand that they appear only as members of a group

that is structurally precluded from signifying the universal. The predicament of such individuals is determined by and irreducibly linked to their
status as minora status that assumes visibility as a mode of departure
from the norm. It is for this reason that a hypervisibility often accrues to
the one who is nonetheless muted, or subalternized, which is to say denied
self-representation. In many times and places, woman and black function
as figures of such visibility in nonrepresentability. Accordingly, the task of
achieving representability, of acquiring a voice in the political sense, is a
complex one that remains relentlessly vulnerable to the lure of mere appearance and/or vocalization in public. When this happens, and the achievement
of visibility is not transformed into a mode of accessing recognition, there is
a redoubling of the fetishistic structure by which racialized and sexualized
exclusion operates. The TRC had to negotiate this lure while inhabiting a
role of mere supplementarity vis--vis the state. It was haunted by the fact
that it appeared to promise new structures of recognition (and on that basis a
just distribution of rights and goods), when in fact it could only make visible
the gap between the achievement of visibility and a fuller transformation of
the structures of (political) representation. If, in the aftermath of the TRC,
many people felt that it was simply a space for telling stories, a space severed
from the political sphere and vulnerable to aestheticization, the intervening
years have seen a multitude of efforts to repoliticize testimonial practice.
Much of this has taken place in an instrumentalized cultural sphere in
which the museum has assumed a dominant role as the arbiter of historical
consciousness rather than aesthetic judgment.15
Over the past decade and a half, a plethora of institutional and cultural
projects have taken on the task of creating spaces wherein those whosetrauma
consisted in being muted, can, as it were, have a voice. Prime among
these is oral history. Indeed, oral historical narrative is a core element in
most of the museological projects that address themselves to the apartheid
erafrom the museums at Constitution Hill (including the Womens Gaol
and Prison4), to the Robben Island Museum, the Apartheid Museum, the
Workers museum, the District 6 Museum, and many other, smaller museums in cities and towns across the country. In all of them, the recording and
playback of testimony, sometimes accompanied by ghostly projections in
which the speaking subject appears to be calling out from the surfaces of
the buildings or from diaphanous screens that hang from ceilings, provides
the centerpiece for an aestheticized politics of revisionist and restorative
historiography. The experiences that are narrated in these spacesof abuse
at the hands of the police, of suffering in prison, of lost children and missing
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parents, of prohibited and punished loveare inserted into an expanded

and expanding image of the past, one that seeks to displace the ideological
occlusions of the apartheid era. Holding out the fantasy of greater transparency and hence of a fuller accounting of the violent eventfulness that had,
for so many nonwhite South Africans, also become routine, this expanded
conception of the past anchors the new museologys truth-telling ambition.
And within its frame, testimony and knowledge production appear to be
folded over on each other, indeed to become one and the same thing. But
is testimony ever capable of being truth telling? Does this aspiration not
confuse the two modes of tellingof revealing the secret and of telling
without revealingwhile effacing the limit of what can be encompassed
within the sphere of knowledge or made available to reflection? Is there not
something in the strange institution of testimony that insists, precisely, on
that in speech which exceeds it?16
The logic of the trial, of course, refuses this. The truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth, which every witness is asked to tell under
oath, in the name of God, but also in their own name, insofar as they are
responsible for the telling of this tale, refuses that secret. But literature, and
perhaps other arts, need not submit to this conflation. It can expose the
falsifications that arise when testimony and truth telling are reduced to each
other both because of its claim on unverifiability (this is what I understand
by the term literature) and because of the manner in which it problematizes
and proliferates the names under which the speaking that is literature occurs.
Every character marks the place, which is nonetheless nowhere in the world,
where speaking occurs.
The Trials of Historical Fiction

It is not incidental that a great deal of writing in South Africa today is marked
by a profound uncertainty about the line between literature and historical
realtyand indeed, about the very possibility of literature. In the aftermath
of apartheids mendacious rule, South African writers often seem to inhabit
a space of radical, Adornian doubt: after such lies, whither fiction? In contemporary writings, referentiality vies with a more purely fictive ambition
again and again, with facticity winning out over hallucination and dominating
the possible terrain of the literary. One thinks here of the writings of Antjie
Krog, whose Country of My Skull limns the boundary between journalistic
memoir and fiction while submitting its fictive moments to the demand that
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they illuminate the historical truth of apartheid. Here, the fictive works by
making the unbelievable actualities of apartheid believable to the reader
who would otherwise disavow them as too improbable.17 The irony is that
the fictive works in Country of My Skull by negating its status as other than
reality. Equally suspicious of fiction and truth, Krog anchors her text in a
verifiable archiveagainst which it is endlessly comparedthough she
maintains a gap between the author and the narrative persona. The I that
speaks is both transient and capable of being otherwise, and in this manner,
Krog both appropriates fiction for the project of (social) self-transformation
and contains it there.18
In Zo Wicombs Davids Story, by contrast, the exploration of an
historical event, the assassination of Dulcie September by members of the
liberation movement, becomes the occasion for a fiction obsessed with the
instrumentalization of truth in a movement that seeks freedom from racist
lies but that is contaminated by suspicion.19 In this case, fiction permits the
recognition of the impossibility of truth, and in this moment, the project of
literature too is called into question. Ivan Vladislavics descriptive fictions
work in a different mode, suspending narrative and emphasizing the seriality of daily existence, in which, nonetheless, the threat and anticipation of
a traumatic event haunts everyones consciousness. This possible event is
staged in terms of a future reading, a reading of the individual trauma as an
index and symptom of the social crises attending the end of apartheid but
expressing little faith in the possibility of a resolution achieved in the trial
scenario. Vladislavics narratives are largely set in Johannesburg and have
the quality of Kaf kaesque allegory, but their mise-en-scne is verily photographic in its capture of the materialities of contemporary South African
urban existence.20
In all of these works, one discerns an ambition to speculate on dimensions of the historical real that remain inaccessible to empiricism and that
exceed what might have been addressed if it had not been fully resolved either
in a formal legal context or in the pseudo-juridical theater of the TRC. It is
in this sense that these works inhabit that aporetic space between law and
lawfulness when it is triangulated by the question of justice. If Felman has
led us to expect literature to assume the burden of exploring what the trial
cannot achieve, South African writers extend this function to the investigation of what literature must do in the very absence of the trial, once it has
become an object of nostalgia or the figure of what might have been.
Two major alternatives to this conundrum have been elaborated
within South African literature: the first is the turn to the mythic and the
comic fabular; the second is the rejection of the confessional form of the
novel and the radicalization of the split between telling and revelation.
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The first of these is exemplified by the writings of Njabulo Ndebele and

Imraan Coovadia. InThe Cry of Winnie Mandela, Ndebele responds to the
unresolved questions of the struggle by turning to myth in the moment
that it became literature. He finds in the figure of Penelope, as she has
been bequeathed to us by Homer, a means to interrogate the relationship
between the very public predicament of the disgraced struggle icon, Winnie
Mandela, and the less visible waiting to which so many other women were
assigned under apartheid. Imraan Coovadias scandalous Green-Eyed Thieves
makes Mohammed Atta the referent in a comic novel about counterfeiting
in a diasporic South Asian community in South Africa. An inadvertent job
making a fake driving license for Atta entwines twin brothers in a global
conspiracy of which they are instruments but not agents. Although anchored
in a particular historical event (the attack on the World Trade Center on
11 September 2001), Coovadias fabular tale also allows for a generalizing
recognition of the overdeterminations within which any historical actor is
caught, and the novel can thus be read back into the apartheid era as well
as forward into our own.
Each of these works has achieved iconic status, though none approaches
the stature of Coetzees novel, Disgrace, a work that, as Antjie Krog has
said, ripped open more debates and conversations about South Africa and
colour than any newspaper article or non-fiction book ever did.21 I have
written elsewhere at some length about this noveland tomes of criticism
have now been devoted to Coetzees Nobel prize-winning book; here, it
must suffice to remark that the debate about Disgrace has itself reflected a
crisis in the status of the literary in South Africa. The relationship between
Coetzee and the novels focalizing protagonist, David Lury, has been the
subject of endless debate, but by and large Coetzee has been held culpable
for Lurys consciousnessincluding his bathetic sexism and paternalistic
racismand consequently accused of a failure of imagination: a failure to
embrace the transformations necessary for the overcoming of apartheid.
Significantly, David Lurys own psychic exodus commences with what he
believes to be an illegitimate trialfor sexual harassment if not assaultin
the academic institution where he is employed. When he refuses to submit
to its jurisdiction, he abandons himself to a space in which other characters
have similarly rejected the fictions of the trial as a means of achieving resolution to historical contradiction. His daughters refusal to prosecute the men
who rape her strikes David Lury as an inexplicable moral failure, but he has
himself already fled the pseudo-legal apparatus of the universitys board of
inquiry (a vague stand-in for the TRC perhaps) and with it the truths and
forms of closure that it would impose. The terrifying landscape into which
he inserts himself is bereft of the consolations of the trial, but the aesthetic
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alternative to which he turns is also troublingly inadequate. Lury retreats

into romanticism (that purest pursuit of the Kantian sublime) with a fantasy
of writing an opera about Byron, but this remains a failed impulse and his
labors to find another mode of enunciation are finally satisfied only when
he takes up the care of animals whose language, such as it may be, remains
inaccessible to him.
In this admittedly brief and broadly stroked image of the contemporary
literary scene in South Africa, it becomes clear that the question of the trial
is, first and foremost, a matter of situating the speaking subject in order to
remedy a representational failure. The trial promises a speech that is full
not in Lacans sense, wherein it would articulate desire without repression,
but in a fantasy of plenitude as perfect commensuration with the real. But
South Africa is a society where the state and its legal apparatus are still
unstable, where the chasm between law, lawfulness, and justice has been
agape for decades, where the only theater of justice worked (to the extent
it did) because it was not fully within the juridical domain. In this context,
the aesthetic cannot succeed by virtue of its promise to reveal what history
cannot, through retreat into autonomy. The frequent blurring of the line
between history and fiction in South African writing evidences this striving
for an alternative. But beyond the fabular, there has also emerged a form of
narration that departs from the fantasy of either plenitude or revelation, and
it is that alternative that I wish to consider in depth here. It is to be found
most articulately in Yvette Christianss novel, Unconfessed.
Unconfession: The Event as Narration without Revelation

Unconfessed was published shortly after the conclusion of the TRC, and
takes up these many ethically demanding issues in a complex narrative displacement, turning to the archive of slavery in South Africa and thus to the
prehistory of apartheid in order to stage both the seduction of reclamation
and the challenge of resisting it. The novel is, by the authors own admission, a mode of response to the excavation of a fragmentary trial transcript
of a woman who is variously named but ultimately captured as Sila van de
Kaap. In 1823, this woman killed her son, a boy of about eight years old.
She was, according to the Cape Colony records, tried and found guilty, then
sentenced to death, but also reprieved and transferred to Robben Island, that
space of abandonment and enforced uselessness into which the colonial state
cast its dissenting subjects. Dispersed documents of the legal proceedings
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brought to bear on Sila provided Christians with the inciting elements

of a narrative without referent, for they were traces of the encounter with
power but not, precisely, evidence of a life, certainly not of a subjectivity.22
To be sure, there were details to be gleaned: that Sila was pregnant and thus
immune to execution when first transferred to Cape Town from George,
where she had been arrested, and that she became repeatedly pregnant during
her period of incarcerationthe result of being used as a prison prostitute.
That she had been beaten to the point of deafness by her owners. That she
had been parted from her children through sale. That she had been named
and renamed in efforts to conceal her identity as the freed woman identified
in the wills of her masters widows. That her case had been the object of
inquiry by the government of King George IV. But as to the interiority of
the woman who endured these events, one can only speculate.
In Heartsore, an essay reflecting on her encounter in the archive,
Christians writes:
Of her life, we know almost nothing. In the archive, she survives
only in the fragmented records and palpable silences of criminal
proceedings, recognized under various related names, including, most
frequently, Sila van de Kaap. To the extent that she remains visible
to us now, it is as a shadow figure and a repudiation of colonialisms
will-to-power in knowledge. Even so, it appears that Sila van de
Kaaps story is one of thwarted hope, bitter disappointment and stubborn presence, but also of a desire for speech and of the impossibility
of being heard fully from within slaverys discourse.23
As Christians goes on to argue, the life of that woman called Sila van de
Kaap is available in the archive only as an object of others actions. She delineates two general discourses within which Sila appears. One is a discourse
of property in which white men contest her status as free woman, which
she repeatedly claims had been granted to her in the wills of her owners
widows. This discourse informs the trial in which she was accused and found
guilty of murder but also of the destruction of her masters property. But a
second discourse, that of liberal Christian humanitarianism, emerges in the
appeal, wherein her predicament at the hand of predatory and even criminal
interests is adduced as a mitigating circumstance. In neither of these cases
was slavery itself at issue. All that could be disavowed within the court of
the Cape Colony was the violation by individuals of the limits put on its
practitioners, limits that ensured the perpetuation of slavery as much as its
containment.
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As Christians tells us, the only word reportedly spoken by Sila in the
admittedly incomplete transcript of her initial trial appears as an enigma.
Hertseer, translated as heartsore, is the word she is said to have offered
when asked why she committed the deed. But hertseer is an affect ambiguously attached to Silas killing of her son, the boy named Baro. It may be
either an antecedent (not necessarily a cause) or an effect of the act. And
by virtue of this ambiguity, it would be used by the states representatives
and Silas own advocate as evidence of quite different dispositions. For the
former, it marked the point at which her willfulness asserted itself, but
only because they read it as a refusal of the demand for revelation. In this
instance, the demand of the prosecutors was less for testimony than for
confession: the absolute transparency of a self in the trial. For her advocates,
however, the mysterious word heartsore constituted evidence of a state of
psychic woundedness appropriate to her abused position, and it functioned
as a placeholder for what might have been a disclosure of her otherwise
unspeakable history. In this case, transparency is what trauma forecloses. But
both sides subscribed to the fantasy of the trial as the place where secrets
are relinquished and where, in fact, none can be permitted to remain. In one
case, a will obstructs the opening to knowledge. In the other, an incapacity
of the will blocks the same route.
Christians quotes Derrida in claiming there can be no private archive
but adds that
this does not mean that the public and iterable differences in the
archive exhaust the particular knowledge and private experience to
which such utterances attest. There is something that can never be
made public in the case of Sila and Baro. And this insistent secret
cautions contemporary historians against appropriating Sila for the
cause of resistance and the history of Western subjects-in-the-making.
Deeply private, Baros death is the factor that will not permit Silas act
to translate itself into resistance, even though this act transgresses the
law. Sila and Baro alone have intimate knowledge of the act. And Baro
has a knowledge that exceeds even Silas. This, we can never read.24
There are two orders of the secret here: that which would be amenable to
empirical recording if technical media had been or could have been available and that which no technique of the empirical can ever access or translate. Death stands here as the mark of a radical unspeakability, the limit
of all possible voicings. This we expect from both a psychoanalytic and a
Kantian perspective. With regard to a Kantian understanding, the discourse
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of the sublime as the exemplary form of the aesthetic (and every form of
romanticism emerging therefrom) assumes one can conceive of that which
cannot have an empirical presentation and that art can represent this aporetic
relationship in a manner that testifies to the limits of perception and the
grandeur of reason.25 Death is, of course, a classic theme of the sublime. But
in Christianss essay, life is equally unspeakable.
This insistence on the unspeakability of life marks Christianss texts
refusal of the confessional paradigma refusal that both underwrites and
challenges her fictional exploration of a character named Sila in the novel
Unconfessed. But beyond the fiction, and at the end of her historiographical
account of the archival project that informs her novel, Christians remarks on
the incomplete disappearance that being consigned to the archive ensures,
and writes of an
opacity behind which something moveslives of people, lives moving
against each other, away from each other, a woman washing linen, a
boy running to fetch lemons, complaining of pain, some bread, some
grease, a knife. And the presence of a woman called mistress of a house
some three hundred paces away. And, behind her, ox straps close at
hand, a man who is called master. A boy, dead. A woman consigned
to death. A history of living death.26
It is clear that history is giving way here or at least that the discourse of
history is giving way. In the poetic turn to things of everyday existence is
an intimation of fiction. It will be born of speculation at the point where
the opacity of the others existence, and not merely the opacity of death,
blocks the view.
It is not incidental that Christians gives her novel based on this archival research the title Unconfessed. For the novel is a complex refusal of the
confessional mode as the paradigm for biographical and characterological
fictiona mode that traces itself back to Augustine. It is also a refusal of
the ideological fiction by which the trial assumes the place of paradigm for
truth telling as revelation. At the heart of the novel is not merely the enigma
of the real-historical Silas nonresponse, measured in the abyss that opens
around the word hertseer, but the very impossibility of answering in ones
name to a system that has made the name the site of a permanent accusation
and not merely an interpellation.27 At one point, the character Sila asserts,
Meida rule lives in that and continues, Come hereanother law that
grows from Meid.28 After tracing the many violences that emanate from
this single appellation, including sexual violation, Sila remarks that I was
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like a baby again. The difference is that unlike a primary christening, in

which naming anchors and gives form to the possibility of recognition, this
one substitutes a categorical term for a proper name, and in that moment
transforms interpellation into a kind of accusation in a completely nonreciprocal, nondialectical structure. If this possibility lurks within every gesture
of interpellation (the proper name is itself an abstract categorical term), it
assumes a particular violence in the moment that the proper name is withheld, as when meid or boy or negro (as Fanon tells us) functions in the place
of Sila or Frantz.
The one who is only categorically typed and not properly named is,
we might say, excluded from the possibility of giving testimony. To even
access the right to narrate, he or she must first establish the fact of his or
her subjectivity. It is, I would like to suggest, this exploration of a crisis in
naming that makes Unconfessed such an important supplement and countertext to the kinds of narrative produced by the TRC on the basis of its
confusion ofthe two kinds of telling, that of confession, which is to say, the
revelation ofsecrets, and that of testimony, which is to say, telling without
revealing the secret. The point that is marked in the difference between the
plurality of secrets and the singularity of the secret must be emphasized, for
if the former refers to the empiricities of life, the latter refers to that which
exceeds them, even as they are being narrated.
The Name of Power, the Power of Names

Let us leave behind the historical referent, Sila van de Kaap, and acknowledge
that Unconfessed gives us a character named Sila who is absolutely irreducible to that historical figure whose traces can be found in the archive of the
Cape Colony. The first mark of this distance appears in the name itself. Sila
van de Kaap, one of the official Dutch renditions of Silas name, appears in
the characters laborious effort to use the legal system as the instrument of
her accession to rights as Sila van den Kaapa symptom of the slippage
between Dutch and Afrikaans and of the grammatical imprecision that
threatens to expose Sila, a slave learning to speak in her masters tongue, as
an exile in the language of the law. The novel commences in the third person,
only to be interrupted by a first-person discourse. In the opening section,
still written within the canonical forms of nineteenth-century realism (that
form perfected by George Eliot), Sila reflects on the death of her former
mistress, Oumiesies, and recalls a moment in which the slaves are advising
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each other on how to care for the ailing matron: You tell, each says to the
other (33). In the end, Johannes was the one who decided to speak, but it
was too late (3233).
From the start, then, language is belated in relation to the event it
seeks to narrate. Moreover, telling and speaking are split, though the temporal rupture between event and narration is not exactly parallel to the split
between telling, which appears first in the present tense and in the imperative, and speaking, which occurs in the simple past tense and in a negative
form. Silas reverie recounting this moment is then interrupted by the more
recent memory of another slave woman who killed her children and was
strangled as punishment for her crime. And it is here, after the narrative
recollection of a moment in which telling has been conjoined to death
and death has been recounted in a narrative of blunt, almost mute brevity
(And then they threw her into the sea [33]), that the narrator, Sila, enters
the scene. Get out of my way, she announces. And we are in the space
of a narrative that will not terminate so much as stop, before being closed
by a speculative second-person voicing that addresses the readers desire to
know: You want to know. What happened to her? (341). Again, temporal
instability is linked to the demand for narration. The wanting to know and
the narration remain hostage to the present; the event recedes into the abyss
of pastness and unknowability. But temporal instability also leaks forward.
Because of the full stop that separates the two clauses, we are unsure of the
referent in that seductive question, What happened to her? Does this
refer to that which preceded the events of the novel or that which exceeds
its narrative? Or does it refer to those events still to come, in the aftermath
of the narratives closure?
It might be tempting to read the first-person narrative that dominates
Unconfessed as an effort to reclaim that fullness of presence that history
not only denies (as it denies all such presence) but multiplies in a structure
Christians elsewhere describes as Silas triple jeopardy: woman, black, slave.
Each of these terms marks the point of blockage in the possible access to
self-representation. And it is thus possible to read the novel as an effort at
positive reclamation, of speaking for and from the place of muting. But such
a reading would be mere wish fulfillment for the reader and is not sustained
by a careful examination of the text. For the novel is not a compensatory
filling in of the spaces that the structures of exclusion have produced. We
must not mistake the fiction as a speaking for; it is rather a speaking in
the absence of any fixed place from which utterance could claim to be
grounded in identity. The Sila of Unconfessed is an entirely unreliable narrator whose broken, recursive, and often contradictory discourse evades the
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desire for unity at every turn. She mocks any identificatory aspiration that
might be imputed to the author, and she does so by virtue of the authors
careful tangling of the textual weave. Silas speech stutters, loops back, and
repeats itself in moments that veer between delusion and absolute lucidity.
She is infantile, sagacious, petulant, envious, and compassionate by turns.
Sometimes generous, sometimes covetous, she can be viciously sarcastic and
remarkably sensitive. She loves one of the women on the island, Lys, but is
envious of the other (Mina) and stoops to vindictive fantasy more than she
embraces solidarity in femininity. And although she admits to killing Baro,
this admission is not a confession.
For the most part, the novel is narrated as a series of internal addresses to
other characters, including an address to the dead son, Baro. With respect to
the address to her son, Silas discourse constitutes something like a maternal
pedagogy. But because Baro knows, as no other character can know, what
Sila has done, Baro does not have to and does not receive a confession.
The novel does not in any way constitute a baring of the soul for the reader
who would know what caused Sila to do what she did. For, despite the
admission, Sila also lies. Sometimes she knows she is lying. Sometimes she
wonders about her own capacities for recall. And sometimes the narrative
exposes her as ignorant of her own mendacity. What Sila offers Baro instead
of confession is an account of the life that he was too young to know and
that he is now not present to observefrom the very limited perspective
that is Silas. But this recounting is not a giving of account, either. There
is no final commensuration of deed and consequence. Too much exceeds
what can be told.
To the extent that Sila is a character whose admission of having killed
a son remains discontinuous from the confessional form (Sila ridicules
the pastor and is almost mute in the face of the court that inquires into
her sons death), the novel begs to be read as a repudiation of that paradigm so well described by Felman in which the revelation of the secret
and the telling without revealing are conflated. Sila tells but she does not
reveal. The character of Sila in Unconfessed exceeds both the archive and
the fantasy of transparency that underpins the confessional novel, and
this is achieved at least partly through the play with naming that recurs
throughout the novel.
What makes the novel so illustrative of the dilemmas confronting South
African literary production, including the fraught demands for and disappointments in the possibility of law, lawfulness, and justice, is the degree
to which the character whose would-be owners seek to evade the law by
misnaming and renaming her nonetheless remains beholden to the fantasy
of the proper name and the belief that truth consists in the convergence of
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name and thing. In this manner, she enacts the desire forlawwhile provoking
a recognition of its absence. And she does so because her continued existence
is a doubled indictment of the trials failureits failure to deliver its own
law even though that would have required her death and its failure to
deliver the justice that would have negated the conditions that made her
the bearer of death. Trapped in the ineradicable double bind of needing
law and being its victim, she is relentless in trying to expose the process
by which her owner-turned-benefactors heir has swindled her out of her
freedom by renaming her and thus depriving her of what Oumieseiss will
granted. Yet even as she succumbs to the recognition that a proper naming
will elude her and that every naming is itself a doubling and a splitting of
the thingthe original simulation and dissimulation rather than the still
point of identityshe takes recourse in the law as an institution that could
remedy the violence of misnaming. Returning again and again in memory
to the will and testament in which her freedom was granted, Sila knows that
the document is both a lie and a promise, but her knowledge of its duplicity
does not let her relinquish her hope for freedom.
At the end of the novel, Sila sings out, Fetch me a bag of names.
Scatter them all over this island. I want those names to grow and flower so
that I may remember them (337). Her fathers name, she says, is the most
fragile here. She asks that her mother be given her real name, and she
disavows her own reduction to a place-name, namely de Kaap/the Cape.
Can a place beyour mother and your father? she asks (337). The fragility
of the patronymic is perhaps odd in the land of patriarchal law, but insofar
as colonialism is invariably the subordination of one patriarchy to another,
this vulnerability is perhaps inevitable. More telling is the characters longing
for the plenitude of orality, for it is in writing, she saysin an improbable
echo of Claude Lvi-Straussthat colonial power performs its effacement
of the truth in naming. They make me sick, she says. And now that
sickness has a name. It is forgetting. It is their contagion. They writethe
sound of rats in the grainthey want to put down their fathers name,
their mothers, and their fathers fathers and mothers mothers (33738).
They have names because they have property; it is a matter of inheritance,
of enabling the transmission of property between generations. But Sila is
property, and the mark of her being property is the interruption of another
prior system of naming in which she would not be the origin of her name
but in which she could identify with that other origin. She has lived the
violent consequence of this naming and so, after all, she avows, I, Sila van
den Kaap, I dare to say things that confuse me in a language that has been
given me and which strangles all other language, even the language in which
my own name lived (339).
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I, Sila van den Kaap. The words sound as though they might be
addressed to a trial. When Sila recounts the event of Baros death toward
the novels end, she cannot separate the narration of the event from the
narration of the trial:
I will say this. That day. . .. That day before they welcomed the birth
of their lord. The house was hot with cooking and I was tired of it
all. Baro came to our hut with bruises. And I, a grown woman, knew
what it was to have bruises and how they hurt. He, being a boy, had
bruises the same size as mine. I asked, what will the next day bring?
What will the years bring? . . . I was heartsore.
That is what I told them in the landdrosts court. I was heartsore.
The rest they must tell themselves. They are good at telling the world
what it must think of itself. (269)
While speaking these lines to Lys, a woman imprisoned with her on Robben
Island, she is suddenly struck by her incapacity to tell the story or the possibility that Lys may find it unconvincing. I fear there are things I have
tried to say without success, because I have a sense of more than can be said,
much more (269). Sila has killed the only child whose name she chose (118),
the only one in whom her fathers name resounds (the name actually derives
from an ethnonym from the area of Mozambique whence the historical
Silamay have been taken as a child). She does so on the basis of a terrifying
and melancholy anticipation, whose structure is that of identification. Baro,
who bears her fathers memory in his name, is like her but too young to be
like her. There is a sense, then, in which Sila kills both her father and her son
in this momentand it is this awful forgetting of both past and future that
she will lay at the feet of the colonizers, whose first violence is the abduction
of others from their own language, their own world of things and names.
In this sense, Silas discourse constitutes another, compensatory, trial, one
in which the agents of coloniality and slavery stand accused. But there are
many in the dock. The relative lack of critical attention to slavery in South
Africa, where apartheid has been the primary object of critical historical and
political analysis, is brought under scrutiny by the novel in the very object
of its narrative. And the many complicities between patriarchies (including,
even, those between slaving and enslaved men) are subject to interrogation in
the novel. Silas accumulating indictments of the many institutions in which
law has functioned as the rule of lies opens onto the question of whether
law can ever be conceived beyond the repetition compulsions that emanate
from a concept of law as originating in primal violence.
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Surpassing Sacrifice: Speaking Beyond the Law of the Name

As I said, Baros name carries the memory of Silas fathers ethnonym. Her
killing of the son is, in effect, a killing of the father as the very principle of
descent. The translation of infanticide into patricide marks the womans
entry into the primal scene of civilizational origins, as conceived within a
Freudian paradigm. However, that entry demands a radical transformation
of the narrative structure of laws origination insofar as it is not the aspiration
to access the fathers place of desire that motivates the killing (as in Freuds
Totem and Taboo). Rather, in Silas case, the murder expresses a denialof
any mans capacity to exercise that desire. She narrates the predicament
ofthe woman who would constitute (who would be reduced to) the object
of that desire. Because the novel reframes the competitive relation between
fathers and sons as one between colonizing and colonized parties, the son
is put in a relation of suspension vis--vis the telos of inheritance and the
question of descent as well as of affinity. In essence, the figure of Oedipus
is displaced by that of Jesus. As Christians observes in her reading of the
historical trial, the advocate for Sila (the real historical Sila) could only solicit
sympathy for her in the courts by conjuring the image of the pieta and by
casting the boy, Baro, as a sacrificial offering. This tableau offered Sila the
role of grieving mother despite her status as executioner, and in making the
woman the locus of pious affect, the advocate hoped to stir some compassion
in the judge. In the novel, however, the killing is not afforded a place in any
system of ritual valorization. The boy is killed in private, and the gods are
remote, if not contemptuously dismissed. It is the boy, and not the divinity,
to whom Sila addresses her speech. In other words, the relation between
Sila and Baro remains imprisoned within a purely binary structure. This is
indeed the essence of Silas madness when she descends into its miststhe
reduction of social life to binarity.
If the killing of Baro were properly sacrificial, it would be social. In other
words, it would entail a principle of the thirdinformed by history and law,
and made legible according to the protocols of iterability. It would be of the
order of the symbolic. But Unconfessed allows Sila to contemplate a symbolic
order freed from the system oriented by the universal signifying power of
the phallus. This is why the moments of greatest lucidity for the novelistic
Sila are those in which she becomes capable of communicative relation with
the other female prisoner on Robben Island, Lys. And significantly, this
lucidity is most manifest in those moments when she recognizes the limits
and failures of her own speech. By nature, this relation must remain on
theperiphery of the system of colonial lawwhich is also patriarchal law,
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thelaw of the father in every sense. Hence, Sila and Lys are constantly under
threat from the male prisoners as well as the male wardens. Nonetheless, in
the caring intimacy by which the women attempt to negotiate their awkward
relation to language and by which they attempt to escape the order of the
penal (sometimes forming bonds with other male prisoners), the novel turns
toward the possibility that there could be a sociality, a dialectic of recognition, beyond what Derrida would call phallogocentrism and beyond that
conflation of all law with the law of the father.
The move beyond such a conflation requires that sacrificial value be
relinquished, and it engenders a space from which the heroic has been
banished. In other words, the world in which the trial promises and fails
to deliver closure is without tragedy. The speaking that occurs on its stage
must therefore risk meaninglessness. Indeed, if Unconfessed is postsacrificial,
it is also, in Walter Benjamins sense, post-tragedian. As Elizabeth Stewart
reminds us, Benjamin (like Nietzsche, as well as Horkheimer and Adorno)
saw the end of tragedy in the moment that Socrates offered irony and garrulousness in the face of his own sacrifice, mocking the heroic impulse to
demonstrate indifference to the fates with silence: Socrates dies a sacrificial
death but whereas the tragic hero had endowed the community with the
word that broke the spell of myth silently, Socrates talks and talks, thereby
subverting tragic language.29 As Stewart notes, the chaotic entanglements
expressed in Socrates tireless speaking are associated with the destabilization
of the unities of place and time, iconicized as the court and the trial. There is
something analogous occurring in Christianss fictional rewriting of the story
of Sila, insofar as she gives to Sila a loquacity to match what Stewart refers to
as Socratess garrulousness. This loquacity is also destabilizingnot only of
the claims made by the court but also of the institutional status of narrative
fiction and of the readers own relationship to his or desire for revelation.
Benjamins ambivalent melancholy at the loss of the tragic (which is
also, nonetheless, liberation from the delusion that reduced human society
to groups of individuals) generalizes itself in a vision of the fallenness of
humans to the status of the merely creaturely. A symptom of that creaturely
existence, in which humans are bereft of the possibility of communicating
directly with God, is, for Benjamin, the act of naming by which humans communicate to themselves their capacity to communicatea capacity absolutely
essential to them but restricted to a narcissistic circle. The loss is not merely
alienation from God but also alienation from all the other forms of language
in which other entities, and especially natural ones, also communicate their
being. When this occurs, says Benjamin, naming becomes overnaming,
a vacuous process of designation marked by an irrevocable chasm between
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world and word. It becomes tautological, organized according to principles

of similarity and differencebut without relation to the essence of things.30
It is important to recognize that language of this sortovernaming, designating, and always in need of supplementary context, as well as genealogical
accountingis associated, for Benjamin with the regime of judgment, in
which knowledge is preeminent.31 But knowledge and judgment are here the
substitutes for a sacred transformability and becoming. He closes his essay
On Language as Such and on the Language of Man with an image of the
tree of knowledge standing as an emblem of judgment (in the allegorical sense
of the Trauerspiel) in what he calls the irony of the mythic origin of law.
Christianss character, Sila, is stranded in the same ideality of a symbolic
order in which the law of the lather is offered as compensation for alienation
from a truth before law. But the question of historicity in the novel is not
confined to the simple oppositions of tragedy versus Trauerspiel, the edenic
versus the exiledthough these tropes tempt the author, just as the tree as
icon of a knowledge conceived in the idiom of rooting frequently appears
on Silas horizon as a temptation to nostalgia. Speaking to Lys about a conversation with a fellow slave named January, Sila recalls:
He asked what I found most confusing. I said, the language. And
the laws. He said, yes, and, just as Madagaskar had said that night
before the big feast, the trees had broken his heart.
How many times did I hear that said, Lys? How many times
did Alima talk of trees that made her think of her homeland? Even
Sara and Borra, who lived on the same farm as January, talked to
me of trees. (268)
If the tree provides Sila with an image of genealogical continuity, it is quickly
complicated by the recognition that trees are also only communicable through
words and are thus subject to the problem of translation: Trees. The tree they
call yellow-wood in this country has another name where I come from (268).
This is, of course, the general predicament of overnaming to which
Benjamin addresses himself, as overnaming is the condition of translation. But in the specificity of the yellowwood, a specificity threatened by
translation, there is also a sense of particular location. The yellow-wood
will not stand in for nature writ large. Similarly, the regime of judgment is
historically specific and rather than a theological formalism in which nature
provides the lamenting figure for the muted, the novel insists that the crisis
of language is structured in particular ways, by the legal codes that govern
any colonial state in a given moment and by the informal laws that bind
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some of its members to each other in jealous solidarity. These deprive the
black woman slave in particular of the powers of communicationnot only
in relation to an absolute yet lost communicativity but in relation to that
which is granted to otherseven slave men in exile from their places of
origin. Yet Sila shares in Benjamins sense of a corruption and a violence
that works precisely in and through naming, especially that kind of designating naming associated with the transformation of people into property.
This is categorical typing as namingthe kind that addresses someone
only as meid. It is perhaps the most violent of all overnamings, a sense that
is well conveyed in the English translation of Benjamins German, for the
English phrase also carries the connotation of overwriting. In the registers
of slavery, as in Silas life, overnaming becomes visible as overwriting: the
overwriting of previous names, the overwriting of freedom, the overwriting
of a will and testament by anothers will. Overwriting as overnaming marks
the point of truths effacement, and it becomes Silas task to insist on the
traces of that which has been put under erasure. This is another reason for
her being haunted: Baros specter merely redoubles this relentless predicament and gives it its figural form. It is from here that she dreams and from
here that her dreams can do the work of disclosing what has otherwise been
repressed, namely the violence of a legal order that has made the trial the
scene of languages evacuation and that has made truth a question of mere
conformity to the (unjust) law.
The trial recounted in one of (the fictional) Silas elliptical reveries begins
with a question: The landdrost said, Is it true that on the twenty-fourth
of December last . . . (231). Sila answers, What could I say that would be
answer enough for us all? And she continues, I told myself, Sila you must
let them know what it means to be Sila registered to Van der Watt(232).
But she cannot answer, not even in the moment that they say Speak . . .
Speak, Sila van den Kaap, you have committed a heinous crime (233). In the
stuttering recitation of the inquiry, Sila speaks to Lys, her most attentive
auditor, saying They wanted to know about that last moment my boy was
of this world. But not if he suffered. They said, let it be noted that, in her
insolence, the accused refused to answer a single question. (233). In this
scene, muting becomes refusal, and the colonial orders responsibility for
silencing is converted into an accusation against the nonresponding woman.
Sila is then catapulted back in time, to the moment when the field cornet
conducted his first investigation. Shocked, he asks Meid, wat . . . wat het
jy gedoen (234) [Maid, what . . . what have you done?]. As these words
return to Sila, the natural world erupts in her memory and pushes the story
of the killing aside.
07/11/11 10:51 AM
413
It is in this scene that we discern the uncanny affinity linking Silas

thought and Benjamins melancholy meditation on the fall of language and
the birth of judgment as mere knowledge. It is, of course, an uncanniness
overdetermined by the mythic (Abrahamic) tradition in which both Benjamin
and Christians write and in which Sila also must livemore subjected than
subjectified. She recalls the scene as follows: The field cornet is standing
against a tree. The truth is there, but it is not what he sees. No. No What
has been done is not what he sees. What he sees is what he puts into words
for the landdrost, like feet into shoes because the ground has thorns. But he
can say it all in polite wordsis it true? (234).
The Ends of Literature

Sila is not polite. Her loquacity and/or garrulousness is a direct repudiation of the formal niceties in which a violent law dissimulates itself. It is at
once a mode of deferral and an act of resistance in the face of that recurring
lure of the trial as a place in which violence will be subjected to the law of
commensuration and closure achieved through the production of correspondences between individual intentions and consequences, words and things. If
Felman is correct, and this desire for the trial provides the form in which the
desire for law, as Eliot understood it, expresses itself in late modernity, then
Silaa character who inhabits the modern only as a stowawayprovides the
counterpoint. But she is not merely a figure of literature; she is the figure of
literariness. She gives voice to the longings for a representational adequacy
that is structurally foreclosed for her as a character who is black, female, and
enslaved. But she is always speaking from a place that is elsewhere, telling
her story without revealing her secret, the experience that exceeds language.
The trial to which she refers, and that determines her life on Robben Island
is a spectacle of violence mystified as law. Yet she knows herself to inhabit
a double bind; she needs the law to combat the injustice committed in its
name. What she also knows is that a counterlaw will not in itself generate
justice. So, she talks, and talks, though the mystery of her psyche remains,
for the reader, just that: mysterious.
Unconfessed can be read in relation to a variety of distinct if related
literary genealogies: those of the slave narrative (virtually absent in South
Africa), those of the plaas roman (the farm story, which has been a dominant
topos in South African fiction), those of the confessional novel, and those
of Aristotelian tragedy. At its heart, where soreness resides, is unspeakable
07/11/11 10:51 AM
414
violence. But in Unconfessed we remain uncertain as to which violence is to be

subject to the commensurations and consolations of the trial, which trauma
subjected to containments of representation. Is it child murder or slavery,
sexual violence under patriarchy or dispossession under colonial capitalism,
property or its lack that must be brought to the heel of rule or healed through
historicization? This proliferation of violences and the traumas associated
with them constitutes the truth telling of the novel, produced in a moment
when truth telling had been elevated to a mode of national regeneration.
Yet, as I have tried to suggest, the TRCs mimicry of the trial specularized
truth telling but could not guarantee any truth, nor mark its limit. Its status
as a supplement to the juridical domain gave it moral authority and allowed
it to partake of discursive forms more commonly found in literature. But in
this very moment, those forms collapsed inward, as testimony and revelation converged on each other. In the aftermath of that process, two distinct
demands on testimony continue to be made. One asks of testimony that it
perform a renewed function of revelatory truth telling in the service of historical revisionism. This is done within museological projects, and they are often
couched in therapeutic language. The other, exemplified by Unconfessed, has
liberated testimony from the task of revelation and disavows the possibility
of transparency even for the one who would seek to know herself. Between
these two demands, the terrain of South African writing continues to be
preoccupied by the task of reimagining the place of fiction and its relation
to history in that strange institution that is literature.
If there is something to be learned in South Africa about the predicament of literature more generally, it is that the function of the aesthetic is
often appropriated by the political, and that this is particularly so under
authoritarian regimes, among which apartheid stands as a potent recent
example. This is not the same as saying, with Benjamin, that fascism entails
the aestheticization of politics. Rather, it is to suggest that the possibility of
speaking in a name other than ones own, a possibility that literature embodies
and that constitutes its highest form of freedom, becomes mere and violent
irresponsibility (a refusal of responsibility) in political actuality. This is Silas
lesson. The renaming, misnaming, and overnaming to which she is subject
prevents her from ever speaking in her own name; to this extent she is denied
political subjectivity and self-representational possibility. Those who perform
this violence are equally incapable of speaking in their own name; they do
not accept responsibility for the violence that they perform, but assign it to
an originary order in whose name they claim merely to enforce the law. The
solution to this traumatizing violence need not be a restoration to that unity
fantasized in Benjamins theology, for that would be a mute world of divine
07/11/11 10:51 AM
415
resemblances. This is Silas other lesson: that the historical world stretches
out in the communicative relations between individuals who will never know
each other but to whom they might yet be responsible.
Columbia University
Notes
1. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008),67.
2. Eliot, Middlemarch, 67.
3. Plato, Minos, trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1963),386.
4. Plato, Minos, 386.
5. Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2002), 8.
6. Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 56.
7. These techniques included differential pedagogy, in which knowledge was disseminated
to some populations for some purposes and not to others, as well as elaborate systems of censorship in both the public and popular cultural spheres and official disinformation and governmental cover-ups of counterinsurgency activities, including cross-border military activities in
Mozambique and Angola. A particularly useful recent history of censorship in South Africa can
be found in Peter McDonalds The Literature Police (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
8. On this issue, see Mahmood Mamdani, Amnesty or Impunity? A Preliminary Critique
of the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRC), diacritics
32.34 (2002): 3359.
9. Rosalind C. Morris, The Mute and the Unspeakable: Political Subjectivity, Violent
Crime, and the Sexual Thing in a South African Mining Community, in Law and Disorder in
the Postcolony, ed. Jean and John Comaroff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 57101.
10. Jacques Derrida, The Strange Institution Called Literature: An Interview with Jacques
Derrida, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3375.
11. Jane Taylor, Ubu and the Truth Commission (Cape Town: University of Cape Town
Press, 1998).
12. Fiona Ross, Bearing Witness: Women and the South African TRC (London: Pluto Press,
2003).
13. I am here paraphrasing the arguments made by Freud in his writings about trauma, first
in the essay on the war neuroses, and then, more complexly, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
See Introduction to Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses, in An Infantile Neurosis and Other
Works, vol. 17 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953), 20516, and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, vol. 18 of The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 164.
14. This structure is elegantly described in Freuds essay, Note Upon the Mystic WritingPad, in The Ego and the Id and Other Works, vol. 19 of The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 22532.
15. This relationship is an unstable one, however, for the museum is an institution constantly
subject to reencompassment by the aesthetic. This tendency is best exemplified in South
Africa by the repeated and accelerating displacement of history by heritage as the idiom in
which to conceive of relations to the past. The latter is no doubt motivated by an aspiration to
recognize the persisting effect and future opportunities immanent in the past as well as more
porous conceptions of the relationships between different temporal orders. It is nonetheless
07/11/11 10:51 AM
416
inseparable from the generalization of commodity aesthetics and from the regime of property,
including intellectual and intangible property.
16. Jacques Derrida, Passions, in On the Name, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey Jr., and
Ian McLeod (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 27.
17. Krog speaks about the status of the fictional in her writing in the interview with Duncan
Brown, entitled Creative Non-Fiction: A Conversation, Current Writing: Text and Reception
in Southern Africa 23.1 (2011): 5770. Her position should not be confused with a rejection of
literature; in particular, she credits J. M. Coetzee with sparking more critical reflection on South
African reality than the author of any nonfiction. But the purpose of the fiction remains the
transformation of the social real, and she is suspicious of the desire for aesthetic autonomy. What
she is most critical of, however, is the failure, within literature, to grasp and communicate the
complexity of lived experience. It is the reductionism of fiction to single or limited narratives
that constitutes for her the greatest source of untruth.
18. Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull ( Johannesburg: Random House, 1998).
19. Zo Wicomb, Davids Story (New York: Feminist Press, 2001).
20. See, for example, Ivan Vladislavic, Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked
(London: Portabello, 2006), and The Restless Supermarket (Cape Town: David Philip, 2001).
21. Duncan Brown and Antjie Krog, Creative Non-Fiction, 67.
22. On the archive as a repository for the encounter with power rather than evidence of
subjectivity see Michel Foucault, The Lives of Infamous Men, trans. Robert Hurley, in
Power, vol. 3 of Essential Works of Foucault, 19541984, ed. James Faubion (New York: New
Press, 2000), 15775.
23. Yvette Christians, Heartsore: The Melancholy Archive of Cape Colony Slavery, The
Scholar and the Feminist Online 7. 2 (2009), http://barnard.edu/sfonline/africana/christianse_01.
htm (accessed 27 September 27).
24. Christians, Heartsore. The Derrida text to which she refers is Archive Fever. It
may be useful to note, with Christians, that in contemplating the TRC, Derrida equated
the gathering of victims testimonies with archiving or, more specifically, the problem of the
archive. See Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 48.
25. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), esp. 12859.
26. Christians, Heartsore.
27. In Heartsore, Christians speaks at length of the difficulty of translating hertseer as
heartsore and suggests that much is lost in translation. Indeed, this movement in translation is part of the predicament to which Sila was herself subject, her trial having taken place
as the British colonial regime was coming to bear on and displace the Dutch legal code of
the corporate colonialism that had previously been administered by the East India Company.
28. Yvette Christians, Unconfessed (New York: Other Press, 2006), 139. Hereafter cited by
page number.
29. Elizabeth Stewart, Catastrophe and Survival: Walter Benjamin and Psychoanalysis (New
York: Continuum, 2009), 2223.
30. Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London: Routledge, 1998),
1920.
31. Walter Benjamin, On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, in vol. 1 of
Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 19131926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 72.
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Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 48, Number 3, 2011, pp. 388-416

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in the name of trauma:

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 388

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 389

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 390

t estimonial aestheticstrategies. This can be seen in both visual and

Truth and Reconciliation: The Secret of Testimony and Literature

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 391

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 392

Truth Commission, very successfully produced by William Kentridge and the

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 393

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 394

Seen but Not Heard: The Double Bind of Subalternity

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 395

or gendered minorityand that they appear only as members of a group

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 396

parents, of prohibited and punished loveare inserted into an expanded

The Trials of Historical Fiction

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 397

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 398

The first of these is exemplified by the writings of Njabulo Ndebele and

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 399

alternative to which he turns is also troublingly inadequate. Lury retreats

Unconfession: The Event as Narration without Revelation

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 400

brought to bear on Sila provided Christians with the inciting elements

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 401

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 402

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 403

like a baby again. The difference is that unlike a primary christening, in

The Name of Power, the Power of Names

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 404

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 405

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 406

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 407

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 408

Surpassing Sacrifice: Speaking Beyond the Law of the Name

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 409

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 410

world and word. It becomes tautological, organized according to principles

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 411

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 412

It is in this scene that we discern the uncanny affinity linking Silas

The Ends of Literature

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 413

violence. But in Unconfessed we remain uncertain as to which violence is to be

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 414

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 415

CLS 48.3_07_Morris.indd 416

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