Hiding Away The Ghost of AMITY: The Narrator’s Fake Endings as Screen Memories in Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2010)

Abstract

Although studies on trauma have grown exponentially since 1990s with Trauma Studies, in different shapes and identities, trauma has been a part of personal and cultural space for much longer. After the formal recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder as an ailment that affects both the body and the mind, Trauma Studies has expanded to other fields of study including literature. Trauma studies in Literature is a movement that focuses on how trauma is handled in literature both thematically and functionally. Literature can play a performative role in its representation of trauma through literary and narrative devices. This essay aims to explore how Andre Levy imitates the effect of screen memories, which are a symptom of trauma, with her experimentation with metanarration in The Long Song (2010). Screen memories are essentially substitute memories which replace the traumatic events in memory. They are attempts of self-preservation of the mind. Levy’s narrator July tries to replace some traumatic parts of her life in her autobiographical story in order save herself the pain of reliving them through narration. This results in abrupt and unexpected endings to her story at two different parts of the novel, where she tries to break off the narration with a seemingly happy ending. However, her disputes with her son, Thomas, prove that there is more to the story as she picks the story back up only to reveal an increasingly painful and traumatic proceeding. Therefore, this makes her attempts to end the story prematurely screen memories that hide the traumatic truth, not from the reader, but from July herself through a self-imposed alienation from her previous life as a slave in a Jamaica sugar plantation.

Keywords

• Slave Narrative
• The Long Song
• Screen Memory
• Trauma
• Andrea Levy

References

1. Adair, G. (2019). ‘As constricting as the corset they bind me in to keep me a lady’: colonial historiography in Andrea Levy’s The Long Song. Kinship Across the Black Atlantic: Writing Diasporic Relations (pp. 85-104). Liverpool University Press.
2. Anim-Addo, J., & Lima, M. H. (2018). The power of neo-slave narrative genre. Callaloo, 41(1), 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.2018.0000
3. Caruth, C. Introduction. In C. Caruth (Ed.), Trauma: Explorations in memory (pp. 3-12). The John Hopkins University Press.
4. Davis, C., & Meretoja, H. (2020). Introduction to Literary Trauma Studies. In C. Davis & H. Meretoja (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma (pp. 121-130). Routledge.
5. Kaminer, D., & Eagle, G. (2010). Posttraumatic stress disorder and other trauma syndromes. Traumatic Stress in South Africa (pp. 28-59). Wits University Press.
6. Lansky, M. R. (2015). Screen Memories and Screening Functions. American Imago, 72(1), 89-99. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26305108
7. Levy, A. (2010). The Long Song (2011 Paperback). Headline Review.
8. McNally, R. J. (2003). Remembering Trauma. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

9. Öztabak-Avcı, E. (2017). “Playing Bad for White Ears”: A Study of the Narratee in Andrea Levy’s “The Long Song”. Journal of Narrative Theory, 47(1), 117-142. https://www.jstor.org/stable/45274963
10. Pedersen, J. (2014). Trauma: Toward a revised understanding of literary trauma theory. Narrative, 22(3), 333-353. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24615578
11. Silverman, M. (2020). Screen memory. In C. Davis & H. Meretoja (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma (pp. 121-130). Routledge.
12. Sütterlin, N. A. (2020). History of trauma theory. In C. Davis & H. Meretoja (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma (pp. 11-22). Routledge.