Racial Wounding and the Aesthetics of the Middle Voice in Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses (Critical Essay‪)‬

... somewhere something lurked which bellowed, something human since the bellowing was in human speech, even though the reason for it would not have seemed to be. Absalom, Absalom! (300) Over the past decade a considerable body of information and theory has developed around the subject of trauma, memory, history, and the problem of voice. (1) As Saul Friedlander says in his introduction to Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution," "it is the reality and significance of modern catastrophes that generate the search for a new voice" (10)--one that can only begin to acknowledge and articulate the sense of the impossible (2) at the heart of such catastrophes and is therefore always in the process of leaving and returning to mark their presence and absence in historical memory. The magnitude and inaccessibility to analysis and understanding of cultural trauma call for a witnessing to and a listening for the incomprehensible. Friedlander is referring primarily to the Holocaust, but Toni Morrison has made similar statements about the difficulty of giving voice to racial trauma and the massive cultural intervention of slavery. In her afterword to The Bluest Eye, Morrison writes that telling the Breedloves' stories was an "attempt to shape a silence while breaking it" (216), and in an introduction to a reading of Beloved in 1988, she linked slavery to modern disasters, saying that the novel "could not have been written or read or even understood fifty years ago. Because we know so much more now than we did fifty years ago. We know a lot. We have seen what people can do" (Remarks).