Traumaarbeit and the Languages of Carceral Trauma: A Discursive Typology of Prison-Time Memoirs in Communist Romania
Traumaarbeit and the Languages of Carceral Trauma:A Discursive Typology of Prison-Time Memoirs in Communist Romania

Summary/Abstract: This paper aims to sketch a discursive typology of memoirs recounting the traumatic carceral experience of former political prisoners under communism. This is a body of literature which in Romania is at best marginal in studies of communist repression by historians and political or social scientists, as it has attracted more interest from literary people. Students of prison-time memoirs under communism usually operate with a dichotomy between “factual” accounts that supposedly document actual prison life and “literary” accounts that obscure the factual truth by embellishing it for aesthetic rather than documentary purposes. Unlike them, and in keeping with the views of post-Freudian trauma critics like Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1992), or Leigh Gilmore (2001), I posit that traumatic experiences (re)present themselves to our subjectivity as always already translated into a discursive template and, as such, they are already committed to memory as simultaneously “factual” and “literary”. This is a process which I call “traumawork” (Traumaarbeit) and which helps me modify the sequential model of dreamwork transformations (Traumarbeit) from classical psychoanalysis and suggest that the latent and manifest contents are in fact not just coincidental in the written memoirs, but that they were simultaneously scripted (discursively encoded) from the start. I adhere to a subjective constructivist model that insists on the centrality of discourse in the constitution of our subjectivity. This prompts me to conclude that our memories consist of the mnemic imagos which are discursively processed through traumawork. This means that they are poured into different discursive matrices that differ from each other by virtue of the different “master tropes” which they involve (Hayden White 1973, Bogdan Ștefănescu 2018) which function as structuring principles for our representations of traumatic events. These discursive matrices or templates are constitutive of the psychological and ideological profile of each author and furnishes the memorialist with different manners of inscribing carceral life experience in testimonials. By looking at the memoirs by Ion Ioanid, Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla, Ion D. Sîrbu, Nicolae Steinhardt, and Constantin Noica, I exemplify here three such discursive paradigms  the realist approach of antithesis-driven radicalism, the lyrical perspective which pursues inner harmony by means of metaphoric anarchist type of scripting, and the mannerist concern with thought-provoking antinomies and paradoxes voiced in an ironic-conservative mode.

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