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ABSTRACT
This article discusses the tension between the temporality of progress, characteristic of the modern time regime and totalitarian politics of time, and the nature of traumatic memory, as they are embedded in Nora Ikstena’s novel Soviet Milk (2015). Ikstena’s widely translated work is particularly informative in this aspect because it offers a detailed and self-reflexively narrated account of living during the Soviet occupation of Latvia, illuminating the way individual memory of troubling past events clashed with sociopolitical frameworks that endorsed the forgetting of its own victims. In my reading of this novel, I draw on relatively recent studies of experience of time and trauma that have shifted from the unspeakability of trauma to its cultural contexts and narrative possibilities by giving a realistic depiction of suffering and its aftermath. Ultimately, I turn to the question of the ethics of form to show how Ikstena employs the temporality of progress to enhance our understanding of specific historical others, covering also the tie between persistent or structural traumatization and melancholia.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Repše, “Mūsu redzējums prozas valodā,” 6.
2 Nollendorfs, “Mūsu stāsti, mūsu vēsture,” 9.
3 Berelis, Neēd šo ābolu. Tas ir mākslas darbs, 29.
4 Gūtmane, Totalitārisma traumas izpausmes Baltijas prozā, 369–72.
5 Ikstena, Soviet Milk, 33.
6 Whitehead, Trauma Fiction, 3.
7 Hartman, “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies,” 537.
8 Caruth, “Recapturing the Past,” 153.
9 Balaev, “Literary Trauma Theory Reconsidered,” 3.
10 Koselleck, “Does History Accelerate?” 89.
11 Assmann, Is Time Out of Joint? 10.
12 Ibid., 6.
13 Ibid., 194.
14 Ibid., 43.
15 Ibid., 106.
16 Judt, “The Past Is Another Country,” 157.
17 King, “Thinking Past a Problem,” 55.
18 Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 18.
19 Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, 467.
20 Gumbrecht, After 1945, 34.
21 Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, 16.
22 Noordenbos, Post-Soviet Literature and the Search for a Russian Identity, 21.
23 Ibid.
24 For more on this see Ostups, “The Scar Will Always Be There”.
25 Repše, “Mūsu redzējums prozas valodā,” 6.
26 Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing, 41, 42.
27 Balaev, “Literary Trauma Theory Reconsidered,” 3, 6.
28 See Pederson, “Speak, Trauma.”
29 Skulte, “Afterword,” 176.
30 Fludernik, “Ideology, Dissidence, Subversion,” 194.
31 Ikstena, Soviet Milk, 15.
32 Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through,” 151.
33 Hoffman, After Such Knowledge, 60.
34 van Alphen, “Second-Generation Testimony, Transmission of Trauma, and Postmemory,” 482.
35 Ikstena, Soviet Milk, 16.
36 Etkind, Warped Mourning, 36.
37 Ikstena, Soviet Milk, 17.
38 Abraham and Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia,” 130.
39 Ikstena, Soviet Milk, 17.
40 Ibid., 21.
41 Ibid., 44–45.
42 Ibid., 45.
43 Caruth, “Introduction,” 4.
44 Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 324.
45 Ryan, “Toward a Definition of Narrative,” 30.
46 Laub, “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” 69.
47 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4, 12.
48 Arnold-de Simine, “Trauma and Memory,” 141.
49 Toremans, “Deconstruction,” 60.
50 Michaels, Fugitive Pieces, 137.
51 Ibid., 17.
52 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4.
53 Onega, “Hybridity, Montage, and the Rhetoric,” 215, 216.
54 Davis, “Trauma, Poststructuralism and Ethics,” 38.
55 Derrida, “Rams,” 160.
56 Pederson, “Speak, Trauma,” 334, 339.
57 Meretoja, The Ethics of Storytelling, 95, 130.
58 Ikstena, Mātes piens, 23.
59 Ikstena, Soviet Milk, 40.
60 Ibid., 55.
61 Neumann, “What Makes Literature Valuable,” 138.
62 LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 82.
63 Assmann, Is Time Out of Joint? 176.
64 Ibid., 173.
65 Clewell, Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism, 4.