DOLORES HERRERO : OI ree bees (ye80 Sonya Andermahr Peycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works. Volume 14, London: Vintage: 243-258. = (1923) 2001. “The Ego and the Is", The Standard Edition of the Complete Psy chological Works of Sigmund Freud: The Ego and the Id and Other Works. Volume 19, London: Vintage: 12-66, Kristeva, Julia. 1989. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. Myerson, Julie. 2004, Something Might Happen. London: Vintage. 2007. The Story of You. London: Vintage. Saunders, Kate. 2006. “Psychic Scream”. New Statesman (June 5). htip:iwww.newsta tesman.cont/200606050049 (Last accessed on January 15, 2011). Sebold, Alice. 2002, The Lovely: Bones. London: Picador JESSICA ALIAGA LAVRISEN Trauma and Silence in Brian McCabe’s “Say Something” Contemporary Scottish literature characterises itself by its constant search for identity and the very questioning of the concept as a clear-cut definable and stable entity. This is of course not a new interest, since Scottish-literary classics such as Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), or Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sin- ner (1824), just to cite the most popular, already dealt with these identity issues. Liminal states of mind — such as schizophrenia, trauma and other altered. psychological states ~ have been one of the fields where writers could ex- plore identity. There are plenty of works in Scottish fiction that deal with these particular mental states: focalisers who are in a coma — as in Iain Bank’s The Bridge (1986) or Irving Welsh’s Marabou Stork Nightmare (1995); who are drunk — as in MacDiarmid’s classic poem “A Drunk Man. Looks at a Thistle” (1926) or Ron Butlin’s novel The Sound of my Voice (1987); under the effects of drugs — as in Welsh’s Trainsposting (1993); who are mad, and suffer crises or nervous breakdowns, who are terrified — as in Brian McCabe’s short stories “Conversation Are One” (2001), “A. Breakdown” (1985), “The Lipstick Circus” (1985); or who live in a some- what fantastic realm — as in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), or McCabe’s “The Host* (1985). The subject is so common that Douglas Gifford has even stated that it is “a predominant theme of current Scottish writing, that of the emergence from a traumatised personal — and modern Scottish ~ past” (Gifford, Dunningan and MacGillivray 2002: 960). Scottish fiction has often been characterised as focusing on social pes- simism and personal trauma but, as Gifford et al. explained, “Scottish fiction began in the closing decades of the century to move from bleakness and trauma to regeneration” (933-4). According to these critics, Scottish writing became more optimistic and self-assured after the 1990s, when “the moods and possibilities of the fiction had changed profoundly. An eclectic restlessness was linked to the need to find a fresh-starting point, or to find different aspects of Scottish tradition as inspiration” (937). Thus the work2 Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen of Alasdair Gray and lan Banks, for example, presented a totally new per- spective, moving as they did “fom social pessimism and personal trauma” to the rethinking of what means to be Scottish and the presentation of a wide range of possibilities of contemporary Scotland (933). In this late 20th-century Scottish fiction, trauma fiction ~ fiction dealing with a traumatic event or fiction that uses certain techniques that try to re- produce the belated experience of a trauma — becomes a field where writers could both explore the forms of the novel and the short story, and further analyse the complexity of consciousness, of feelings, and identity con- struction, The narration of the consciousness (and unconsciousness) of a traumatised subject, who may suffer from gaps in memory, repetition com- pulsions, hallucinations, sense of fragmentation of the self, and other PTSD symptoms, requires some further exploring of narrative techniques by the writer. The traumatic event resists conventional narrativisation, since it is not fully experienced — processed — as it is taking place, but only belatedly. It could be argued that trauma fiction invites some further exploration of literal representations of the displaced experience and distorted and non- linear narratives. ‘Among the many representations of traumatised characters in the fiction written in the last decades, we find, for example, lain Banks’ acclaimed novel The Wasp Factory (1984), whose protagonist, Frank, has suffered some horrific childhood accident and reveals that he has murdered several of his relatives — something which was, in the narrator’s own words, “a stage [he went] through”, as is stated on the back cover (Banks 2004). Nev- ertheless, the novel’s ending allows the protagonist to emerge “from trauma into a world — and a Scotland — with promise” (Gifford et al. 2002: 929). Espedair Street (1987), which has been described as Bank's “study of a traumatised and guilt-ridden Paisley rock star hiding out in a disused Glas- gow church [...], his concealment of his identity as the surviving member of the world-famous group, Frozen Gold”, would be another example of this interest in trauma as related to positive identity search (929). In another mood, we find Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (1994), a novel dealing with “recovery from trauma, deconsttuetion of the bounda- ries of rural and urban, and presentation by a male writer of a female persona who challenges gender stereotypes” (Gifford et al. 2002: 948). It tells the story of a young Scots woman, Movern Callar, who works at a supermarket, and who, one moming, finds her boyfriend dead ~ he has committed suicide. She hides the body, empties his bank account, and submits the book he has been writing to a publisher under her own name. | Her family name means “to keep quiet” in Spanish. ‘Trauma and Silence in Brian MeCabe’s “Say Something” 83 She flees to Spain, but later she returns, pregnant, and with all her problems unresolved. Scottish women writers also have explored representations of trauma. Janice Galloway’s acclaimed breath-taking first novel, The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989), presents a homodiegetic female narrator suffering from a serious depression after the accidental death of her lover. She desperately tries to find reasons to keep on breathing, to keep herself alive. The novel explores different graphic modes of representation of the narrator’s trauma, as there are incomplete sentences written on the margins of some pages, blank spaces, and columns splitting the narrative into two. A. L. Kennedy’s So I Am Glad (1995), winner of the Encore Award, focuses on the trauma of child sexual abuse and its consequences in adult- hood. Her novel Everything You Need (1999) tells the story of a middle- aged writer, Nathan Staples, who lives on a coastal island in permanent retreat from the world. He is obsessed by the loss of his wife, who had been strangled, and the loss of his daughter, whom he has not seen for a long time and considers to be dead. ‘The subject of trauma is so common that Douglas Gifford has even stated that it is “a predominant theme of current Scottish writing, that of the emergence from a traumatised personal — and modern Scottish — past” (960). Gifford points to one of the key motives for the understanding of this proliferation of traumatised characters and narrators in Scottish fiction: the possible existence of a Scottish “traumatised past”. A past that would not only have affected the fictions of Hogg and Stevenson, but also the writing ‘of contemporary authors. ‘There are several factors that contributed to the “traumatised” Scottish past. The erasure of Scottish real history, which had become so distorted that it could not sustain a literature meeting the requirements of a full na- tional identity, has been considered to be one of the main causes. According to Craig, the “real” past and the romanticised past became confused, and because of this fact, Scottish history could not work as the medium through which the nation could rediscover and remake its identity, since Scottish history did no longer exist as such, it “had ceased” (Craig 1999b: 21). This vision of the Scottish past as being erased, and the Scottish national identity as being “traumatic”, has been very common among intellectuals. Sarah M. Dunnigan, for example, explicitly refers to the Scottish “practice of forgetting or ignoring unresolved conflicts” and the “unacknowledged desires” as part of Scotland’s “traumatic past” (2004: 114). Scottish iden- tity, historic events and cultural criticism cannot be separated. The traumatic linguistic and cultural amputation that took place in Scotland after the Union in 1707, and the weakness of Scottish criticism, influenced | ] / |84 Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen by T. S. Eliot’s conception of tradition,’ contributed to the feeling that both the national and the cultural identity were vanishing. Consequently, many critics and authors believed that the Scottish imagination was “ill” or at least deeply “damaged”,* The critic Cairns Craig contends that the “Scottish predicament”, which refers to Smith’s Caledo- nian Antisyzygy,' can be epitomised as: [...] the total elision of evidence of the past, and its replacement by a novelty so radical that it is impossible for the individual to relate it to his or her personal memories; and, therefore, impossible for that environment to be “related” as a coherent narrative. The constant erasure of one Scotland by another makes Scot- land unrelatable, unnarratable: past Scotlands are not gathered into the being of modern Scotland; they are abolished. (Craig 1999a: 21) Indeed, his description of Scottish culture seems quite traumatic. Nevertheless, postmodern thinking and the emergence of postcolonial studies started questioning this idea of a monolithic cultural tradition based on the stability of language, as was defended by Eliot almost a century ago. These postmodem analyses expose the traumatic reading of the Scottish past as oversimplifying, since it distorts the literary reality of the moment. Moreover, this critical interpretation is damaging, since through its histori- cal and cultural omissions it condemns the last four decades of the Reformation to the status of an artistic wasteland. But the fact is that “traumatic” readings of the Scottish past have been abundant. Nevertheless, the end of the 20th-century saw some changes. Since the 1980s authors started to see the possibility of exploring new Scottish selves. More positive critical views on the concepts of identity, both personal and national, allow for the working through of the Scottish “trauma”. The old self-pitying lament of the artistic wasteland is trans- forming itself into an exploration of the possibilities of the contemporary ? The modernist poet claimed that Scottish literature was merely an appendage of “English Literature” [sie]. As Eliot argued in is famous critical essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), the significance of an individual work of art is not in its unique aesthetic qualities, but rather in its place within an identifiable literary tradition, The basic foundation for such tradition, was argued, is precisely the writing in a single langtiage. Scotland was writing in three languages at that time: Gaclic, Scots and English; and, consequently, it could not be said to have a proper tradition of its own. * As Muir states in his poem entitled “Scotland 1941”, everything left was a sham nation narrated by sham writers: “Now smoke and dearth and money everywhere; / Mean heirlooms of each fainter generation, / And mummied housegods in their musty nichs, / Bums and Scott, sham bards of a sham nation” (Muir 1963: 97) * The Caledonian Antisyzygy meant a sense of self-division that would be reflected in the abundance of contradictions and the union of opposites in Scottish literary texts. ‘Trauma and Silence in Brian McCabe's “Say Something” 85 fertile field of Scottish culture in the last decades of the 20th-century. And the abundance of altered mental states in fiction is no longer seen as a symptom of the Caledonian Antisyzygy or the terrible consequences of the Scottish traumatic past, but rather as a rich field were consciousness, indi- vidual and communal identity and narration can be further explored. The various humorous and postmodernist adaptations of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde are an example of this rewriting. Within this literary context of positive reworking of tradition and the re- newal of personal and national questioning, we find the work of the Scottish poet and short story writer Brian McCabe (b. 1951).° The author is concemed with both Scottish social problems and general human preoccu- pations, and this is reflected in his work, where general philosophical issues are set against the background of Scottish social reality, in a brilliant combination of the regional or particular with a more universal’and general essence. His prose, like his poetry, condenses many elements in one form, open fo various interpretations; it is up to the reader to interpret and look for the different meanings in a text. His short story “Say Something” is a good example of this positive liter- ary questioning of identity and personal relations. The story, full of silences and gaps, asks the reader to complete the story the female character wants to tell but cannot fully utter, As we shall see, the many silences in her flow of speech demand interpretation.’ Silence is not simply a linguistic element that determines the beginning and ending of utterances but, as disciplines such as psychoanalytic theory, communication studies, sociology, anthro- pology, etc., have shown, silence is a complex communicative event related to concepts such as topic, function, setting, participants, etc. A rhetoric of silence emerged, and deconstructivist, structuralist and feminist literary criticisms emphasised a new kind of readability that focused on those ele- ments in a text that have traditionally been overlooked — such as incoherencies, discontinuities, repetitions, ellipses (Johnson 1984: 279). Of course, not all silences are meaningful, but some silences in a certain nar- rative can reveal some inner or hidden aspect that is part of a work’s fictive world. As Virginia Woolf expressed in some of her early essays, meaning is no longer produced by the writer; the reader “can pause; he can ponder; he can * Brian McCabe's The Other McCoy (1990) is an example of a comic Doppelganger novel. © Significantly, the anthology of the Canongate Prize for New Writing where McCabe's short story “Something New” was included after winning the prize, is entitled “Scotland into the New Era”. ” There are twenty-two silences in Izzy's narration,86 Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen compare [...]. He can read what is on the page, or drawing aside read what is not written” (Lawrence 199]: 89), Readers should interpret the story, even the silences in it. If we believe that reading involves exercising our moral understanding, then it seems that those texts that require from the reader a more active engagement ~ in this case, filling in the meaning gaps in the text — are the ones that would allow for a deeper understanding of the world and the exercising of ethical judgements (Carroll 1998: 149). According to this view of the reader as an active creator of meaning, the book-world is never concluded, since meanings are generated in every reading. Inevitably, texts demanding an active role on the part of the reader and denying the death or closeness of a written work,* suggest some relation- ship between the book world ~ which explores infinity of possibilities of rewriting and interpretation — and the extemal world — which might also be changed. Note that this rebirth of a more affirmative and positive move- ment in Scottish literature went hand in hand with “the move to a new optimism regarding self and society in Scotland after 1980” (Gifford et al. 2002: 835) Brian McCabe's short stories tend towards condensation: a minimalist style, compression of meaning, and a general human truth. “Say Some- thing” is no exception, since we have a more or less implied physical place and two characters. The scene’s setting is virtually invisible, and the focus is on the narrator’s voice and on the development of her spoken thoughts. The title “Say Something” — which is a sentence the character-narrator, Izzy, repeats several times to Pete, her partner — is an imperative to speak, directed at the addressee. Thus, the story anticipates from the very start its main concems: the importance of speech and the difficulty of dialogue; the fear of silence or its tyranny: and the isolation of human beings in contemporary society. In “Say Something”, there is no description of the extemal world, but the reader can nevertheless construct a more or less abstract setting or space through Izzy's soliloquy. Words are the matter that seems to make up the story. Firstly, we deduce that she — they, if we also accept the presence of the invisible and silent addressee — may be in the street, since she tells Pete to stop running away, because she has found a doll, a doll that can talk. Then she tells him that she needs to sit down for a while, that she wants to smoke a cigarette and that she will then go upstairs. Apparently, they are going back home together after a party; she got drunk and they ® J, L. Borges’ short story “Pierre Menard: Author of The Quixote” (1941) is the most radical example of this everlasting renewal of books as they are being tead by somebody ‘Trauma and Silence in Brian McCabe's “Say Something” 87 quarrelled. No more explanations are given about the particular circum- stances, location and setting. This may disorient the reader, in that she or he is not given clear coordinates to locate the story but, paradoxically, this indeterminacy also allows the reader to identify with the characters to a certain extent and develop a sense of intimacy with them. As we shall see, identification processes — crucial when dealing with the ethics of fiction — are at the core of the short story’s narrative. This presentation of a more or Jess neutral and general situation is used by McCabe to convey a sense of universality out of a particular situation: a discussion between two lovers, Izzy and Pete. She rebukes him forcefully because of his indifferent atti- tude towards her. The whole short story is focalised through Izzy, who is the only narrative voice, which provides the only point of view for the action nar- rated. The short story consists only of Izzy’s soliloquy, since she addresses an addressee that never answers and does not even seem to be present. The fact that it is a soliloquy has totally different implications from those asso- ciated to the use of direct interior monologue. If her speech were not beard by somebody, it would remain silent, and no communicative act would take place. The action takes place at the moment of speaking, since there are no el- lipses or descriptions, just Izzy’s speech; the narration in the story is wholly isochronous, that is to say, the story time (Erzdhltezeit) and the narrative time (Eyzdhlzeit) coincide. This produces in the readers a strong sense of immediacy, forcing them to play the — passive? — role of spectators of this one-sided discussion. The soliloquy is written in the present tense and re- fers mainly to a past event that is only explained partially, or rather, that can only be reconstructed by the reader through the narrator's references to it, and so, through Izzy’s perspective. Everything that is narrated in the story comes out of the narrator’s mind, and the narration’s thythm, fluid without any interruption, suggests that everything that the character thinks, everything that she wants to express, is actually uttered. One could say after a first reading that she is in total con- trol of the narration, although she may not feel in total control of the situation, as her voice seems hysterical and irritated. However, her discourse is in fact full of silences and gaps; and as her voice emerges clearly and without artifice in the soliloquy ~ there are no other voices, place descriptions or contextual interruptions — the silences are inevitably exposed. What is not said assumes, therefore, aesthetic properties in its sympto- matic appearance — those silences are made physical through their graphical representation: “. . .”, three dots with spaces between them; the silences, expressing what cannot be said, draw attention to the narrator’s88 Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen mental processes and needs. Thus, the readers are forced to interpret those silences to render them meaningful. Patricia Ondek Lawrence’s analysis of silence may be very helpful to interpret the silences in “Say Something”. Lawrence identifies three types of silences in her work The Reading of Silence, devoted to the study of si- lence in the work of Virginia Woolf: the unsaid, that is, something that can be felt or thought but is not said; the unspoken, something that is not formulated or expressed aloud; and the unsayable, something that cannot be said because of some existing taboos or traumas (Lawrence 1991: 117-9). These silences identified by Lawrence can be very helpful in the analysis of “trauma” texts, since they show that some silences can be read as symp- toms of something that has been repressed. That which is not overtly said can be read through the traces left throughout the text. This is the case of McCabe’s short stories, were silence claims to be heard. Tzzy’s silences break the sentences but do not interrupt her flow of con- sciousness, since they point to her difficulty to speak fluently — “I’m really, really sorry but . . . I've just to sit down for a minute. I just want . . . one cigarette, Pete, then I’ll come upstairs, OK?” (McCabe 2003: 259) — and anticipate her more explicit bouts of anger. The fact that the addressee, Pete, is silent, is essential for the understanding of the narrator’s mood and constant talking. Izzy seems irritated, frustrated, and isolated because of Pete’s refusal to communicate with her. His refusal to answer her makes the existence of a dialogue impossible. His silence, therefore, connotes death, paralysis, non-communication. But the symptomatic abundance of silences in Izzy’s speech points to something else: she is not only angry with Pete; it seems there is something hidden in her story, maybe some- thing she has repressed, something unspeakable that she cannot bring herself to express in words. From the very beginning, it is clear that Izzy identifies the found doll — a doll that has the power of speech ~ with herself, since she constantly com- pares herself to it: “Hear what she says, Pete? She says she wants a dwinkie. I wanna dwinkie too, Pete” (259), The narrator constantly draws attention to the parallelisms between the doli’s and her own desires and needs. Thus she tells Pete, her addressee: “You pull the cord, see, like this. . Hear what she says, Pete? She says she is thirsty, Mummy. I'm thirsty too, Pete” (259). The identification process is multiple: she identifies with the doll, the passive object, but at the same time she assumes the role of a fictitious mother — “Mummy” — and of a child in need — “I’m thirsty too, Pete”. At the same time, Pete is associated with the figure of a careless, in- different, silent father: “Say something, will you, don’t just stand there. Pete, you don’t care, do you? You don’t” (269). This identification process tums this particular situation into the story of many other unhappy couples. ‘Trauma and Silence in Brian MeCabe’s “Say Something” 89 Words are not always what they seem, and they can convey various meanings, depending on the listener/reader.’ When her partner, Pete, calls the narrator “Isabel” instead of “Izzy”, as he usually does, she sees some hidden agenda in this: So [knew you didn’t really mean enjoy the part, you really didn’t mean be your~ self. You meant behave yourself or else. [.. You meant be decorative, that’s what you meant, Be the New Blood’s dec’tative fiancée! Be my formal little fiancée [...] Act as a wifeling. (260-1, emphasis in original) Maybe Pete expects Izzy to act as a passive and silenced housewife, a wifeling. But she is not willing to assume the prescribed role of objectified Other, of artificial and silent doll: “a play-thing. And a work-thing. And a sex-thing. And a little wifeling-thing. I can’t be all those fucking things! Not anymore, Pete” (268). Now she has decided to speak up, to be a speaking subject. Just as the change from Izzy to Isabel matters, by calling him “Peter? in- stead of “Pete”, Izzy distances herself from her partner, and attempts to turn him into an objectified Other: “See? I called you Peter. I did. I called you Peter, Pete, so that’s what you are to me now. Peter” (267). The situa- tion and their roles are reversed: she is the one who speaks and he is the silent one. She calls him “Peter” once in order to show him what it feels like; she does not really want to reverse the traditional patriarchal roles al- lotted to man and woman in fairy tales, which can no longer be sustained. As the narrator explains, she is no Sleeping Beauty, and he is no Prince Charming who will wake her up with a kiss: I'm so tired | could sleep for a hundred years, a hundred years, a hundred years, | could do that, Pete, but you wouldn’t chop the trees down, would you? You woulda't wake me with a kiss. No, because your kiss, with that pubic beard of yours, would send me into a fucking coma! (268). Peter, the dumb listener, tums his back on her: “OK, tum your fucking back on me [...] Turn your back on everything, go on. Everything you can’t deal with” (268). Once and again, Izzy implicitly suggests that she is not the only one in this situation; that the role of silent doll is a patriarchal imposition in gen- eral. As she muses on this, she associates patriarchy with her companion Pete, who seems to be a professor of literature: ° The gap between signifier and signified is a recurrent theme in McCabe's pooms and short stories.Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen That’s what you meant, you know you did. You meant speak when you are spo- ken to, otherwise keep your mouth shut. You meant don’t be yourself [...]. For godsake, don’t say what you think! Don’t disagree with the professor! Not about literature! Not about the role. . . the portrayal of women — that’s the word, isn’t it, portrayal? ~ of women in Victorian fiction. Oh no, That’s the professor's spe- ciality. Women in Victorian fiction [...] Don’t shoot your mouth off about the suffragettes, he’s much too learned to disagree witht (261) Through female focalisation and narration, the story speaks in favour of the feminine voice in patriarchal society. Izzy’s personal story becomes the story of many women: Say something. Go on, tell me I’m a drunken slut. Tell me how terrible [ have been. How mortified you were when I dropped my wine. [...] T spoiled it all, didn’t I Pete? The tablecloth, the dress, the carpet . . .[...] Ruined your career, didn’t I Pete? (263-4) The image of the dropping of the red wine reappears later on, which invites the reader to reinterpret the red wine in a figurative way, as a proleptic symbol waiting to be unravelled as the story goes on. Izzy recognises that she did not act properly at the party, but then, tells Pete: “A little red wine isn’t so bad, is it, Pete? It isn’t as bad as blood, not as bad as spilling blood, new blood” (264). The image of the wine is associated with the image of spilt blood and of new blood, and Izzy asks her addressee: “It’s worse, isn’t it, to spill new blood? Get your old ethics textbook out and tell me” (264). Thus, readers are subtly made to interpret the ~ silenced — issue of blood, ‘The narrator comments on how the fact of having the period when she went to school was completely silenced, and how she was expelled for raising the topic. She tells Pete about her personal experience, the unpleas- ant truth, as she puts it, a truth that does not seem to be the same for each of them: “I expect you’ve read a book or two about the truth Pete, ch? Your kind of truth. Anyway to get back to my kind of truth” (267). For her, the truth is not something abstract or something one learns about in books, but something much more tangible, something she can experience: “Anyway, to get back to my kind of truth, this sanitary towel from the games mistress had to last you all fucking day” (267). The fact is that she was expelled from school because she dared to break the rules of silence about men- struation."” She had certain ideas and spoke them aloud. However, Izzy cannot speak overtly about things that she keeps hidden, things she has learned to repress, and it seems as if those repressed feelings and thoughts were struggling to disrupt the narration, rising as silences and "© “Can you understand what I’m telling you? That was why I was ‘asked to leave school’, [raised the issue of the issue” (267) ‘Trauma and Silence in Brian McCabe's “Say Something” 1 breaks, gaps in the (conscious) flow of narration, represented by “>, Still, there is one silence which is not broken; she cannot even utter the particular word that summarises her trauma: abortion.’ Virginia Woolf's imagining of silence as related to the virginal, hermetically or kymenally sealed female in A Room of One's Own (1929), is here related to yet an- other specifically female issue: pregnancy. At the end of the story, the reader realises that Izzy had got pregnant and had an abortion in order to allow her partner to achieve professional success: You look like a ghost. Worse, you're as white as a thesis. An unweitlen one, one that just can’t seem to get written. That one you kept telling me about the first time I got pregnant, that one you had to get finished then (...]. Then we'll get a bigger flat, have a baby! (265) At this point, the whole story has to be reinterpreted by the reader under this new light. Sentences we read at the beginning gain now a new meaning. A second reading offers quite a new perspective on Izzy’s trauma: some elements which are at work in her narration are not uttered; and these si- Iences, gaps and aporias claim to be heard. Thus, for example, the slightly nostalgic and innocent phrase she utters: “Look, it’s one of those dolls that can talk, Pete, I used to have one exactly like this”, becomes terribly pain- ful, as the reader realises she is referring to her lost baby (259). The constant presence of the doll, which is just an object, casts a new shade of meaning on the whole story; its presence as an image, even as a symbolic icon, transforms the whole soliloquy from a natural speech act, into a com- plex, organised construction that by no means could be accidental or spontaneous. This works as a strategy that demands that the reader should find in Izzy's soliloquy a more profound meaning than the merely anecdo- tal. Izzy accuses Pete of being too centred on his books and his career, since she sacrificed her baby for his doctoral thesis ~ “one that just can’t seem to get written” — and of ignoring her truth and reality (265). The narrator in- sists on drawing a distinction between their respective truths. Truth is thus understood in this text as having no absolute value, as something relying on some kind of intrasubjective agreement, something negotiated among equals. In the case of Izzy and Pete, this sort of mutual agreement does not work, since there is no negotiation at all, and no communication, so that “I want to keep it, to hold it, to care, I don't want to... You shouldn't make me have 10...” (269),92 Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen truth is fragmented, and their respective truths do not coincide or find a middle ground for negotiation. As the issue of pregnancy is addressed,” the spilt wine and blood are reinterpreted as an abortion, as is suggested by Izzy at the end of the story when she tells Pete: “I don’t want to lose it. Not this time, Pete. I want to keep it” (269). The absent little girl who had lost the doll found by Izzy at the begin- ning of the story now acquires a much more dramatic meaning: “A little girl’s gone and has lost her dolly, but you don’t care, do you, Pete?” (268); once the issue of abortion has been raised, the reader can easily deduce that she herself is the girl, and her baby is the lost doll. The reader does not see Izzy any longer as a maddened, hysterical woman, but rather as a deeply traumatised woman attempting to cope with her trauma, a woman refusing to go on performing the role of silenced other in her relation with her part- ner: “You’ve pushed my bottom, Pete, and now it’s time to drop the bomb. ‘The only kind of bomb we women ever drop, Pete” (264). ‘The story asks the reader to interpret the silences in the narrative and to identify the missing word: abortion. The fact that it is the reader who con- structs Izzy’s traumatic narrative is very significant, because the author opens up a possibility of renewal: meaning is not fixed, and it can be changed. The reader has the ethical responsibility of interpreting a narration that is, as in life, full of omissions. To state that the narrator is traumatised by abortion may seem a bit too exaggerated, but the abundance of silences and gaps in the text, together with the central presence of the unsayable, justify the search for traces that could hide a traumatic event in the narration. As the feminist therapist Laura Brown has stated, “[fJor girls and women, most traumas do occur in secret, [...] These experiences are not unusual, statistically; they are well within the ‘range of human experience’. [...] They are private events” (Brown 1995: 101). It is important to be aware of the fact that the very concept of trauma is ideologically charged, since it is embedded in specific configurations of cultural meaning and social relationships (Kienzler 2008: 219). Power re- lationships are also at work here. As Brown has pointed out, much of the writing on trauma focuses on male human experiences, since “the range of human experience becomes the range of what is normal and usual in the lives of men of the dominant class” (Brown 1995: 101). As she goes on to affirm, “trauma is thus that which disrupts these particular human lives, but no other” (101). According to her experience as a therapist, some private traumatic experiences would be ignored in patriarchal societies, as their ‘2