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Afterwardsness

-the Formation of the Memory of Trauma in Narratives

Introduction

In psychoanalysis, according to Nicola King, the

notion of afterwardsness means that memory has to absorb

“what [was not] known then” (12). This indicates when memory

comes into being, compared with what is known on site, it

inescapably incorporate some amount of new awareness and

understanding of the event. To enable more understanding and

awareness of the event to occur, the formation of memory

must happen after the event.

Using the approach of afterwardsness, this paper

argues that in the narratives of the memory of trauma, the

making of the traumatic memory usually occurs in the

aftermath. The act of regarding something as a traumatic

experience leads to the memory of trauma. This paper will

illustrate that in the narratives of traumatic memory, the

recognition and the deep feelings of trauma often happen

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after the traumatic event and thus the memory of trauma is

formed and consolidated in the aftermath. First, this paper

is going to engage with Angela Carter’s short fiction the

Bloody Chamber and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s film Blue to

exemplify that in the narratives of memory, victims of

traumas lack understanding of the traumatic experience on

the spot. This disables them to recognize and memorize the

traumatic feelings on site and thus they could merely

consolidate their memory of the trauma at a later time.

Second, this paper will still employ the Bloody Chamber and

Blue as sample texts to demonstrate that only by re-visiting

the traumatic scene in thoughts with the help of chronotope

and focalization change can a victim obtain traumatic

feelings and memory. Overall, this paper is going to prove

that the making of traumatic memory usually takes place in

the aftermath in the texts narrating the memory of trauma.

The Trauma in the Bloody Chamber and Blue

In the Bloody Chamber, for the protagonist, the loss of

virginity to her husband in her bedroom turns out a trauma.

With the first person narrator used in the story, the female

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protagonist appears as the narrator throughout the story.

With the past tense used in the story, the female

protagonist relates to her memory autobiographically. When

she narrates the story in the aftermath, she describes the

necklace her husband, Marquis, gives to her as “cruel”

(Carter, 11). This detail proves that she eventually knows

her husband’s cruelty and links it with the ruby necklace.

What’s more, after discovering that her husband brutally

tortures and murders his ex-wives, the protagonist dares not

‘take refuge in [her] bedroom” since she feels it is the

place of Marquis’ shadow (Carter, 30). The use of the word

“cruel” and the fear of getting close to the bedroom of

intimacy together demonstrate that the protagonist is hurt,

disgusted and scared by her husband. Taking this awareness

of being manipulated and scared into account, being sexually

possessed by Marquis becomes a trauma. Later she wonders

whether she could be “a virgin” again “if [she] played all

Bach’s equations” (Carter, 31). The desire here to become a

virgin again indicates that she wants to get out of the

status of being sexually possessed by Marquis. And this

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intention rightly shows she regards the loss of virginity to

her “cruel” husband as a traumatic experience.

In Blue, for the protagonist Julie, losing her

husband and daughter in the car crash is a trauma. First,

generally, losing beloved relatives is a common trauma for

human beings. Second, after the car accident happens and

Julie realizes it in hospital, Julie tries to commit a

suicide by swallowing massive medicine (Kieslowski, 1993).

This act confirms that fact that the car accident is such a

trauma that it undermines Julie’s courage to live on. This

traumatic experience has caused permanent outcomes for

Julie, which is the forever loss of her treasurable family

members. And if death cannot occur to cure the trauma, only

oblivion can cure it. Therefore, a large part of the movie

is describing how Julie attempts to be oblivious to this

event and her past life (Kieslowski, 1993). Julie’s refusal

to live in the original family house, Julie’s rejection to

the man connected to her past life and other attempts are

shown in this film (Kieslowski, 1993). By rejecting her past

life, Julie makes effort to minimize the pain the traumatic

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event causes. If the past life is distanced and alienated

from Julie, she could pretend she does not lose so much

intimate family connections after her family members’ death.

Here Julie’s effort to totally get out of her past life

uncovers that she is not prepared to face the loss of her

past family life. This experience of the beloved ones’ death

has remained sad and hurtful for Julie. The drastic change

of Julie’s life after the car accident and lots of her

attempts to avoid thinking about her past indicates that her

loss of her intimate family members remains a long-term

trauma for Julie.

The Absence of Understanding Trauma on the Spot in the Bloody Chamber

The memory of trauma is hard to form on site. In the

narratives of memory, for a victim, the absence of the

understanding of the traumatic experience on the spot

disables him or her to recognize that “this is a trauma” on

site. The protagonist of the Bloody Chamber undergoes the

ignorance when the trauma occurs. As discussed below,

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lacking in recognition of trauma on site, the memory of

trauma cannot come into being on the spot.

In the Bloody Chamber, the protagonist loses consciousness

when having sex with Marquis in her bedroom. Her bedroom is

full of mirrors (Carter, 14). The narrator then tells

readers that “a dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides”

(Carter, 17). By employing the word “impale”, the narrator

reveals the protagonist’s loss of the virgin status here. By

saying “a dozen”, the narrator implicitly conveys the

message that this sex scene takes place in the protagonist’s

bedroom which is decorated with lots of mirrors where “a

dozen” husbands’ reflections exist. Then the protagonist

relates that “[she] was brought to sense” in the next

paragraph (Charter, 17). Weaved into the two quoted details

above, the sexual process, namely, the to-be-found sexual

trauma occurs. And in the period of the sexual intercourse,

the protagonist loses her senses. As a consequence, the

protagonist cannot discern properly during the sexual

experience, let alone recognize that this loss of virginity

is a trauma.

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In addition, when losing virginity to Marquis, the

protagonist lacks information about her husband’s

abnormality and cruelty. At the point of the sexual

intercourse, she sees this sexual experience as a normal

expression of love in a marriage. She describes Marquis as

“with so much love” (Charter, 18). Besides, when their

sexual act has to be terminated due to an urgent business

phone call, the sentence “my dear one, […] did [my business

urgency] hurt her” is used in the narration (Charter, 18).

This sentence is narrated from Marquis’ point of view but it

is without quotation marks. As a matter of fact, this

sentence only pretends that it speaks Marquis’ mind while it

is expressing the protagonist’s imagination. Here she

imagines Marquis to love her, care for her and feel sorry

for stopping the sexual caress. Hence, at this point, she

unconditionally links Marquis with love and thus she only

associates the sexual intercourse and her loss of virginity

with love. Here she has no way to discern that her husband

is an actual torturer. So, on the spot of shedding her

virgin blood, she does not consider it as a trauma.

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Shortly, the protagonist of the Bloody Chamber is not

conscious while the sexual intercourse takes place, and she

regards her loss of virginity as a result of love behavior

immediately she sheds virgin blood. Considering these two

reasons, the protagonist is unlikely to recognize her loss

of virginity in this sexual experience as a trauma on site

and thus she is unable to form any memory of trauma on the

spot.

The Absence of Understanding Trauma on the Spot in Blue

Julie is absent from consciousness during the car

accident and when her husband and daughter die. After the

car crash diminishes on the screen, the screen shows Julie’s

opened eye in a zoomed in manner (Kieslowski, 1993). From

Julie’s eye, audience could see a man talking to Julie about

her husband’s and daughter’s death (Kieslowski, 1993). Among

the man’s lines, there is one sentence asking the question

“during [the car accident], were you conscious” (Kieslowski,

1993). Next, he murmurs that “you must have been

unconscious” (Kieslowski). Scientifically speaking, in a

serious car crash where two people die, it is not surprising

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for the third person to be unconscious on the spot. In

addition, Julie’s eye which is zoomed in takes up the whole

screen when the man is talking to her and here she is silent

excepting saying one word, “Anna” (Kieslowski, 1993). The

eye occupying the entire screen implies that the rest part

of Julie’s body does not recover enough to react. Her

silence also signifies that it is not easy for her to speak.

The hardness of speaking and giving other reactions besides

looking tells that Julie is physically harmed a lot by the

car crash and she is just brought back to consciousness.

Moreover, the word “Anna” is de facto Julie’s question about

whether her daughter Anna is alive or not. No matter Julie’s

family members die upon or after the car accident, due to

this ignorance of her daughter’s situation, Julie could not

have been conscious during the car accident and during the

period of her daughter’s death. These evidences denote that

Julie loses her sense when the traumatic event takes place.

Besides, the traumatic event is depicted in an

indiscernible way as well. Firstly, in the opening scene,

there is a car running and the husband and daughter’s images

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show up, both of whom do not talk on the screen (Kieslowski,

1993). Not until the car crash scene disappears does Julie’s

face turns up on the screen (Kieslowski, 1993). The

deliberate omission of the Julie’s image makes her feelings

before the car crash vague to the audience. The silence of

Julie’s daughter and husband makes the whole scene distanced

from audience as well. Secondly, when the car accident

occurs, there is only a short period of loud crash sound

without screaming (Kieslowski, 1993). On the one hand, this

is another piece of evidence proving Julie’s unconsciousness

on site of the car accident since otherwise she would have

screamed due to human instincts. On the other hand, the

uncanny silence around the car crash distances itself from

the audience. This is because audiences are not accustomed

to “quiet car crash”. Thirdly, the color employed to be the

background of the car accident is blue. In contrast with

normal films where there are colors like red and yellow to

portray the bloodiness of car accident, the color, blue, in

Blue calms the emotional eruption during a car accident.

Through the color blue, the car accident is portrayed as far

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away from the audiences and thus indiscernible for audiences

to a certain extent.

By making the trauma unperceivable both to the victim

on site and to the audiences, the films reveals that to

Julie, her pain is caused by the formation of the traumatic

memory in the aftermath instead of the trauma itself. As the

plot goes, Julie’s reluctant recalling of her past life and

the car crash is the source of her pain and suffering. And

these reluctant moments are in fact the process of forming

the memory of the traumatic accident, which will be

exemplified later in this paper.

Using Chronotope and Changing Focalization in the Bloody Chamber

In the narratives of the memory of trauma, for the

victim, the re-visiting of the traumatic events in his or

her mind often gives rise to the formation and the

consolidation of the memory of trauma. Here as the “present”

self, using chronotope, when the victim recalls the

traumatic place, he or she revisits the moment of the

traumatic experience in his or her thoughts and then he or

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she can read the traumatic event with changed focalization.

Examples from the Bloody Chamber and Blue are explored below to

explain this process.

Chronotope helps form the memory of trauma

afterwards. In the Bloody Chamber, after attaining new

recognition of her husband’s brutality, chronotope enables

the protagonist to trace back to the moment of her losing

virginity when she thinks about the bedroom. In accordance

with M.M. Bakhtin, the literary notion “chronotope” refers

to the inherent “connectedness of temporal and spatial

relationships” (84). In the Bloody Chamber, the point of

losing virginity is temporal. And this temporal moment is

linked with the bedroom where it occurs. The concept of

“chronotope” uncovers that “space becomes […] responsive to

the movements of time” (Bakhtin, 84). This connectedness

means one could trace back to various moments happening in

the place by recalling the place. In the Bloody Chamber, after

finding out Marquis’ torturous behavior, the protagonist

narrates that she cannot seek shelter in her bedroom since

it “retains […] his presence trapped in […] his mirrors”

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(Carter, 30). Here the images of Marquis in the mirrors echo

the depiction of “a dozen husbands” which this paper

explains above. So here “his presence trapped in […] his

mirrors” is a phrase implicitly expressing the scene of the

sexual intercourse. Here owing to the intrinsic linkage

between moments and space, the bedroom evokes the

protagonist to think of the moment of their sexual

intercourse. That is to say, because of chronotope, the

protagonist re-experiences her loss of virginity in thoughts

by recalling the bedroom in her mind. Therefore, when the

moment of the traumatic event has passed, by enabling one to

recall the event based on space, chronotope lays the

foundation of the formation of memory in the aftermath.

Before getting to the discussion of how focalization

changes when traumatic event is recalled, this paper would

like to clarify the definition of focalization. In Mieke

Bal’s words, focalization refers to the relationship between

the presented things and “the vision through which they are

presented” (145). However, she also defines “focalizor” as

“the subject of focalization” (Bal, 149). If “focalization”

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is a certain type of “relations” between two things, its

subject will be one of the two things. According to Mieke

Bal’s definition of focalization, the subject of

focalization would be “the presented things” or “the

vision”, neither of which is “focalizor”. Hence Bal’s

definition of “focalization” contradicts her definition of

“focalizor”. Taking this into consideration, this paper

would propose that the definition of “focalization” be just

“the vision through which elements are presented”. This new

definition enables the subject of the vision to be called

“focalizor”. What’s more, Paul Wake argues that focalization

is provided “from a certain perspective” (19). Compared to

“relations”, “vision” is more likely to be given off from

some perspective. Based on the new definition that

focalization is the vision from some perspective, the

focalizor is someone that generates that certain

perspective.

In the Bloody Chamber, only by recalling the traumatic

event with a changed focalizor could the memory of the

trauma be formed. Paul Wake comments that focalization is

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something about “seeing” (19). Accordingly, the “focalizor”

is someone who sees. Although the narrator of the story is

always the female protagonist, when the sexual trauma

happens, the person who sees this event on the spot is the

protagonist’s “past” self. As illustrated in the previous

paragraphs, this “past” self has no idea of Marquis’

torturous orientation. Here this paper calls this “past”

self as the “uninformed focalizor”. After the sexual

intercourse, the protagonist was given more information

about Marquis’ bloodthirstiness and inhumanity. The

protagonist sneaks into Marquis’ “stark torture chamber”

after Marquis claims that he leaves for New York (Charter,

28). Here she discovers the naked corpse of “the opera

singer”, Marquis’ first wife (Charter, 28). She also found

the skull of another wife and the corpse of “the Romanian

countess” in the coffin (Charter, 29). Not until then does

she realize that her husband is a cruel torturer and

murderer towards his different wives. At this moment, the

narrator narrates that she cannot “take refuge in [her]

bedroom” (Charter, 30). As proved in the last paragraph,

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here chronotope makes the protagonist revisit the scene of

the sexual intercourse in mind. At this point, the focalizor

of this sexual intercourse is the “present” self. This

“present” self is informed of Marquis’ brutishness. So here

this paper names the “present” self the “informed

focalizor”. Then the narrator announces the protagonist

wishes to be “once more a virgin” and attempts to cure

herself by setting herself “the therapeutic task of playing

all Bach’s equations” (Charter, 31). Her word “therapeutic”

indicates she needs curing. This need of cure denotes that

she regards her loss of virginity to an abnormal husband as

a trauma. Here she recognizes the sexual intercourse as a

trauma only when the uninformed focalizor changes into the

informed focalizor. After the focalizor changes, the

protagonist defines the sexual event as a trauma and there

the protagonist forms her memory of trauma. Therefore, in

the Bloody Chamber, the memory of trauma merely comes into

being upon the change of focalization.

Using Chronotope and Changing Focalization in Blue

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Like what is in the Bloody Chamber, the function of

chronotope helps form the memory of trauma in Blue. One

particular scene where chronotope works is when Julie

watches the video of her husband’s and daughter’s funeral.

In the video, there are two coffins (Kieslowski, 1993). Here

coffins are space, and owing to its connectedness to its

moments of holding dead bodies, they often remind people of

death. This chronotope applies to funeral as well. Funerals

as a setting, usually inform people of the moments of

honoring dead people. Hence the funeral plays the same role

as the coffins in terms of triggering Julie to think about

death. As illustrated above, the death of Julie’s husband

and daughter is a trauma for Julie. However, not until Julie

sees this video does she shed tears (Kieslowski, 1993). This

means the chronotope which associates deaths and funerals

here gets Julie to recall her loss of family members.

Without chronotope, the inseparable linkage between moments

and place, it is difficult for funerals and coffins to make

Julie consider the trauma. Accordingly, here this paper

claims that chronotope helps bring about the revisiting of

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trauma when the victim is conscious enough to form the

memory.

As is in the Bloody Chamber, in the film Blue, when

viewing the video, the focalizor has already changed. On the

spot of the car crash and the deaths of Julie’s husband and

daughter, Julie loses her consciousness. Here this paper

calls the Julie at this moment the “unconscious focalizor”.

Because this Julie who focalizes on site of the traumatic

event is not conscious, she does not have the ability to

form any memory of the deaths which occur. Nevertheless, as

time goes by in the film, Julie’s consciousness recovers.

The passing time allows her sense to pick up. And when she

is conscious enough, the perceiver of the traumatic event

becomes the “conscious focalizor”. The conscious focalizor

attains more capability to realize the tragic deaths, so the

memory of trauma is consolidated when the “conscious

focalizor” appears.

On the whole, the change of focalizors requires the

memory of trauma to be consolidated after the traumatic

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event and chronotope enables the formation of memory to

occur afterwards. On the one hand, changing focalization

necessitates time. The time gap between the “uninformed

focalizor” and the “informed focalizor” allows new

information about the traumatic event to turn up. And the

new information helps recognize and understand the trauma.

Similarly, the period between the “unconscious focalizor”

and the “conscious focalizor” enables consciousness to come

back, which is essential to memory consolidation. So the

focalization change shows up after the traumatic event.

Therefore the formation of the traumatic memory accompanied

with focalization change happens in the aftermath. On the

other hand, the connectedness of time and space, namely

chronotope, lets the victim revisit the moment of trauma in

mind when he or she thinks of space linked to the trauma at

a later time.

Conclusion

In the Bloody Chamber, due to the lack of information

and loss of sense on the spot of the traumatic event, it is

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difficult for the victim to recognize her loss of virginity

as a trauma on site. However, at a later time, when she is

more informed of Marquis’ cruel and torturous behavior,

chronotope takes her back to re-visit the traumatic sexual

scene when she thinks of the bedroom. Here the renewed

focalizor enables her to recognize the trauma. Because of

this recognition, she formed the memory of trauma and wants

her virginity back.

In the film Blue, because of Julie’s loss of sense on

the spot of the car accident and her unconsciousness on site

of her husband’s and Anna’s death, the memory of the trauma

is impossible to be brought into being. After the traumatic

event of Julie’s family members’ death, Julie becomes

conscious in hospital. At this point, owing to the intrinsic

relations of time and place, that is to say, chronotope, the

setting of the funeral and the coffin reminds her of the

death cases. Here, in the aftermath, the “conscious

focalizor” Julie gets the chance to revisit the trauma,

which refers to the loss of her family members, and then she

consolidates her tragic memory of the trauma.

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In conclusion, in both visual and literary narratives

of memory, due to the unconsciousness or unawareness on the

spot, the recognition and correspondent formation of the

traumatic memory is unlikely to take place on site. In the

aftermath, when the victim gets more time for more

information and consciousness and revisits the traumatic

event in mind with the aid of chronotope, he or she attains

the memory of trauma.

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Works Cited

Bal, Mieke. “Focalization”. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of

Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985. 145-

165. Print.

Bakhtin, M.M. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the

Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics”. The Dialogic

Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and

Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press,

1981.84-258. Print.

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Blue. Dir. Krzysztof Kieślowski. Miramax Films, 1993. Film.

Carter, Angela. “The Bloody Chamber”. The Bloody Chambers and

Other Stories. New York: Penguin, 1979.7-41. Print.

King, Nicola. “Memory in Theory”. Memory, Narrative, Identity:

Remembering the Self. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,

2000. 11-32. Print.

Wake, Paul. “Narrative and Narratology”. The Routledge

Companion to Critical Theory. Eds. Simon Malpas and Paul Wake.

London and New York: Routledge, 2006. 14-27. Print.