Horizons de l’inassimilable : du réalisme traumatique dans le roman britannique contemporain

Abstract

A spectre haunts contemporary British fiction. Whether it concern sexual trauma in Anne Enright’s or John Banville’s novels, the trauma of the Great War or of the Second World War as observed by Pat Barker or Martin Amis among others, or the trauma of global terrorism in the fiction of Ian McEwan, the representation of trauma has become ubiquitous in the contemporary British novel. Still, it is the very notion of representation that this article will address, as linked with the evocation of psychic states characterised by absence, or more precisely by that which remains inaccessible. The problem at hand is then that of a traumatic realism which would address the task of presenting or performing (as opposed to merely reprensenting) the hole or blind spot which, by definition, defies memory, escapes from consciousness and thwarts emplotment. Traumatic realism engages with the issue and the figure of the horizon of the presentation of what is not presentable. As they cannot represent the inassimilable presence of trauma, such narratives opt for strategies that get them to look like the symptoms of trauma and become iconic of a process that they can only summon asymptotically

Keywords

• M. Amis
• J. Banville
• P. Barker
• A. Enright
• I. McEwan
• horizon