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Abstract:

This paper shows how the traumatized protagonist of this memoir learns to articulate past horrors. This allows her not only to take a certain distance from them and to diagnose her problem, but she also finds hidden resources of the kind Christopher Bollas calls “psychic genera”. The generative force of these psychic images enables the person to move from a false to a real self. But the narrator goes further: not only does she “undo the fear, to write that new language” (143) that she needs to rebuild her own life but, like Joyce’s mouthpiece Stephen Dedalus, she criticizes ideologies which were upheld “in the false name of tradition”. Thus encountering time and again “the reality of experience” the narrator uses four kinds of languages to spell out her predicament: the language of skin and gestures, of space, images and objects. The essay is inspired by (among others) Agamben, Bollas, Winnicott, Schilder and Nancy.