Shards of Trauma: Autoreflexive Resources of the Narrative Model 'War on War' in Oksana Zabuzhko's Novel 'Museum of Abandoned Secrets'

• In Event: Liberation or Immiseration?: Narratives of Epistemic Crisis in Literature Across the 19th and 21st Centuries

Abstract

Women's writing contains great liberating potential because it allows us to transcend traditional masculinity. H.Сixous calls this transgression a "volcano" that "tears away the bark of the old legacy of male culture." Women's writings about war often do not involve the translation of female stories, but are always characterized by emotionality, intuitiveness, corporeality, and empathy. In our case we will talk about the modeling of the narrative model "war on war" in Oksana Zabuzhko's postmodern novel "Museum of Abandoned Secrets" and the search for new interpretative meanings related to the representation of this model. We examine how the structural parameters of autoreflexion participate in the construction of this model, which represents the traumatic experience of the relationship between Ukrainians and Poles in Second World War. We try to analyze how the oniric discourse builds a narratological intrigue that connects “fragments – shards” of trauma into a single traumatic field. In constructing a narrative about the mental portrait of the Polish in the novel we emphasize such autoreflexive strategies as: otherness of the Self as Alien, constructing the image of the Collective Victim, and constructing the Horizon of the Future. In the postmodern text, these strategies generate new meanings: they invert the central binary opposition, change the narrative optics according to the lens principle, and even perform a prognostic function.Thus, women's writing can be seen as an act of liberation and as a prospect of searching for new paths and alternative codes that create new unique pages of women's literary tradition.

Author

• Oleksandra G. Shtepenko, Interregional Academy of Personnel Management (Ukraine)