Aftermath
I’ve rarely devoted a post to criticizing one book. But there are aspects of Aftermath that highlight all that’s wrong with the adoption of trauma theory by literary critics, a recurring theme of this blog.
What makes Aftermath different is that it is engaged with an actual trauma. Instead of using trauma theory to explain a text, it uses the literary imitation of trauma, above all the experience of fragmentation, to explain a genuinely traumatic experience, a double murder. It doesn’t work.
A highly regarded book
Preti Taneja, a British author of Indian descent, received the Gordon Burn Prize for Aftermath. The prize honors the year’s most dazzlingly daring and avant-garde work of English-language fiction and non-fiction. Her first book, We That Are Young, a version of King Lear, set in a modern-day Indian business family, received the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was short-listed for several others. I found it hard to find critical reviews. Critical comments yes, here and there, but no critical reviews.
The most critical comments were reserved for Goodreads, a reader response website sponsored by Amazon. Many readers stated that large parts of the book were incomprehensible due to its stylistic peculiarities: absent punctuation, large gaps between words and phrases, incomplete sentences, and so forth. One reader says rip out 80 pages, presumably the ones written in an attempt to represent the traumatic experience as a textual one, and the book makes sense as a history and critique of the Muslim experience in India and England. I agree. The book gets better toward the end.
The Atrocity and its background
Though the book often reads as though Taneja was in the midst of the double murder, she wasn’t. She didn’t learn about it until the next day when her partner read the newspaper to her over breakfast, and Taneja realized she knew the name of the attacker, Usman Khan. The 28-year-old had taken the creative writing course Taneja led at a high-security prison two years earlier. The attack took place at a reunion of the program. The newspaper reported that he had been shot dead by police, after stabbing five people, two fatally. One was her colleague, Jack Merritt. Darkly amusing to some was the fact that Khan was initially subdued by a participant using a Narwhal tusk fastened to the Cambridge conference room wall.
Taneja had been invited, but stayed home, preparing for a literary festival. She says she feels both relieved and guilty to have missed the horror and has been left wondering how to make sense of her peripheral connection to the atrocity.
She tells me she has now come to call it “disenfranchised grief … for those who had known the perpetrator, it was something unspeakable”. She is now, she notes in Aftermath, writing “in the wreck”. (Guardian, November 27, 2021) *
“Astro-city”: the attempt to represent trauma in a text
The simplest way to convey the narrative style is to point out that “atrocity” is spelled “astro-city” every single time, I estimate well over one-hundred times throughout the book. It took me 88 pages to figure out what she was trying to say with this affectation. The state did it, creating the conditions that led to the atrocity. One problem with this use is that it denies Khan his autonomy. Furthermore, at other points she presents a nuanced account of the question of where the responsibility began and ended. The narrative portion of the book is capable of subtleties the stylistic portion can’t capture.
Taneja uses fractured form to reproduce in the text the experience of trauma. Trouble is, actual trauma becomes confused with textual trauma, as when she refers to “the atro-city, this prison of narrative and counternarrative.” (p 60) Elsewhere she states that “prison is a palace made of narrative . . . nothing in there but narrative.” No, prison is a place made of concrete and steel. It’s hard and its real. “Concrete Mama” it’s called by some prisoners (McCoy and Hoffman). It’s hard and its cold but it’s always there, always waiting to take you back. To be sure, prison is alive with stories. I listened to prisoners’ stories for more than a year (Alford,1997). But no one tells stories in solitary confinement (“administrative segregation”), and confined lives lead to confined stories, lacking in imagination. Dreams, a realm of freedom, are the exception, and prisoners generally keep dreams to themselves.
