Of Holes and Wounds: Postcolonial Trauma and the Gothic in Catherine Jinks’s The Road

Abstract

This paper analyses Catherine Jinks’s The Road (2004), a multi-protagonist novel, looking into the relationship between personal and historical forms of trauma in the context of postcolonial Australia and following Rothberg’s comparatist approach. More specifically, and taking advantage of the many synergies between the traumatic and the gothic, it studies the novel’s reliance on gothic tropes like the uncanny and the abject in order to demonstrate that both theme and narrative form work together against the overcoming of individual and national plights. The indigenous paratexts that frame Jinks’s story, read in the light of Walter Benjamin’s theses on history, prove particularly meaningful in this respect.

Keywords

• Trauma
• Australian postcolonial gothic
• the uncanny
• the abject
• Indigenous tales