Trauma, Gothic Apocalypse and Critical Mourning: The First World War and Its Aftermath in Chris Womersley’s Bereft

The article focuses on Bereft (2010), a novel by Australian writer Chris Womersley, which applies the framework of trauma to depict the (failed) reintegration of the returning soldiers after the First World War. Using Gothic and Apocalyptic tropes, Womersley addresses the question of the aftermath of violence in the lives of an Australian family and the Australian nation. By combining the insights of trauma and Gothic studies, the article demonstrates how Bereft undermines the meta-narrative of Australian participation in the First World War, questioning the myth of Anzac and national cohesion. It proposes to read the novel as an example of critical mourning, which, rather than cure from trauma, suggests a re-examination of the dramatic sequels of the imperial confl ict. Rage seems to off er here an intriguing alternative to the forgetful practices of commemoration. By revising the militarized national mythology, Bereft redefi nes the First World War in terms of loss, trauma and desolation, and negotiates a place for broken bodies and minds in Australian cultural memory. The defi ning moment in Australian cultural memory of the Great War is the landing of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac) forces at Gallipoli, Australia’s fi rst major armed confrontation during the confl ict. Only fourteen years old, through stupendous feats of courage, on 25 April 1915, the Australian federation was transformed into a true nation. The romanticized legend of the Anzac, shaped by Australia’s offi cial eyewitness Charles Bean, highlighted the outstanding characteristics of Australian men, such as courage, loyalty, physical strength and antiauthoritarianism, features earlier attributed to the Australian digger/bushman (Seal; Keshen 8). The memory of the brave Australian soldiers on the cliff s of Gallipoli was soon fused with a narrative of Australianness, which neglected the fact that Gallipoli was a serious military defeat, “with Anzac, which was among the initial invading force of 50,000, suff ering 7,600 casualties and then withdrawing after eight months” (Keshen 8). In the post-war years, the myth of the glorious 98 Anna Branach-Kallas achievements of Anzac soldiers, seen as catalysts of a new nationalism, was celebrated by Australians. Although, besides New Zealanders, British and French soldiers also took part in the campaign, in the Australian national imagination Gallipoli was represented as an entirely Australian undertaking. After Gallipoli, in Australia the term “Anzac” began to be used only in reference to Australian troops (Keshen 8). Synchronously, since the 1960s, the Australian legend has been challenged as over-simplifi ed, based on several exclusions, in terms of ethnicity, race and gender, important factors in “a war that was fought for the freedom to keep Australia white, British and openly militaristic” (Reynaud 301). Nevertheless, in spite of the multilayered critique of the Anzac myth,1 at its centenary, the Great War remains the essential event that marks Australian independence from the British Empire (see Spittel 269; Reynaud 300).The modern version of the Anzac has been redefi ned “as one of unity, Australianness and inclusivity,” refl ecting what Australians want to believe about the 1914–1918 confl ict a hundred years later (Reynaud 301). The war awakened both Australian nationalism and imperialism, yet it is the former that occupies a central position in the narratives of commemoration. Colonial loyalties and the support given by Australians to the British Empire in what was an imperial, global war are thus eclipsed. The confl ict’s tremendous costs for the dominion, with over 60,000 dead among the 400,000 volunteers, out of a population of fi ve million, are still overshadowed by the offi cial discourse of courage, freedom and nationhood (Keshen 8). Since the 1960s, the Anzac legend has also become an important literary theme. In contrast to the canonical British representation of the Great War in terms of trauma, disenchantment, futility and ruin, Australian literature tends to depict the confl ict “at one extreme, as a foundational event, and at the other, as a devastating national tragedy from which the country has yet to recover” (Rhoden 286). In mainstream literary works, the tropes of action and heroism are privileged over passivity and victimization, while the war itself is represented as a constructive adventure. The war might be horrible, but it is “a task to be done” by stoical, selfl ess and pragmatic Australian men (Rhoden 276–277). Clare Rhoden links this optimistic approach to the Australian national character and the bushman ethos of the pioneering past. Inscribed within the Australian tradition of insubordination (also in relation to the cliché of war’s futility and dehumanization), “Australian wartime confrontation with mortality in fact celebrates life, even contingent life, and living, as opposed to simply affi rming the futility of war and mourning war’s victims” (Rhoden 277). In this perspective, the remembrance of grief and war trauma itself becomes problematic. The reliance on the myth of Anzac as the idealized nation builders conceals the operations of biopower inherent in war,2 which reduce the existence of soldiers to what Giorgio Agamben refers to as bare life, exposed to unlimited injury and death “in the most profane and banal ways” (114). The “licensed Th e First World War and Its Aft ermath in Chris Womersley’s Bereft 99 displacements of the realities of war”, inscribed within the legitimizing narrative of the Australian nation, tend to de-realize the actual goals of warfare and attempt to “confer meaning on the meaninglessness of war” (Gana 78). Consequently, commemorating the dead killed in an imperial war, which is remembered as the birth of the modern nation-state, involves several forms of self-forgetfulness. As David Lloyd emphasizes, for the postcolonial subjects the function of the practices of commemoration is to “lose” their loss in order to become docile subjects of a “therapeutic modernity” (222). In this sense, mourning often involves reconciliation with the past “that is at odds with a postcolonial desire to reclaim or recover that which was lost/stolen” (Durrant 95). By contrast, Sam Durrant proposes a form of critical mourning, which, instead of soothing colonial/imperial trauma, exposes the collective wound, disrupting the identifi cation of the subject with the state inherent in national mythology (Durrant 96; see also Lloyd 218). It is “a recalcitrant, anti-therapeutic form of mourning that, rather than accommodating the subject to postcolonial modernity” (Durrant 97), dismantles the amnesiac eff ects of the discourses of commemoration by synchronously revealing the violence that constitutes subjectivity (Durrant 93–94).3 Bereft, published by Chris Womersley in 2010, set between 1909 and 1919, focuses on the experience of Quinn Walker, a returning soldier from Flint, New South Wales, Australia. The novel is not a linear, coherent narrative, for it shares many of its ambivalences and uncertainties with the Gothic convention. The central protagonist has been profoundly marked by the war, but the defi ning experience of his life was the rape and murder of his beloved sister Sarah in 1909 by his uncle Robert. Wrongly accused of the atrocious acts, the sixteen-year-old had to run away from his native town and to conceal his identity. Bereft is therefore to a large degree a narrative of guilt, paranoia and persecution, Quinn being a man “perpetually on the verge of departure” (26). He volunteers for the front hoping for atonement, yet the Dardanelles and France prove devastating experiences which shatter his sense of self: “First exile, then war. Everything was in ruins” (243). The traumatic symptoms Quinn suff ers from – fl ashbacks, nightmares, hallucinations – are therefore directly related to war, yet at the same time war trauma covers the initial trauma of family violence. Womersley thus powerfully illustrates Cathy Caruth’s statement that “trauma is not only the repetition of the missed encounter with death but also the missed encounter with one’s own survival. It is the incomprehensible act of surviving – of waking into life – that repeats and bears witness to what remains ungrasped within the encounter with death” (6). Quinn has acquired a profound wisdom about the limits of human endurance and does not care about life. What is important for him is a half-conscious desire for justice, which causes him to return to Flint after the war. Bereft challenges the legendary view of Australian heroism and of unique bonds between the Anzac. As an outcast on the run, Quinn is particularly tempted by the war’s promise of glory and community. The potential transformation of the 100 Anna Branach-Kallas “private ego into a national persona” proves, however, detrimental to his sense of self, and is experienced “like a death, abandonment, a severance from life” (Leed 205).The only brotherhood Quinn is admitted to is “a brotherhood of terror”: in Bereft the soldiers become accustomed to “the press of many bodies, to the whiff of other men and their whispering hearts of fear” (53).What connects them, however, rather than a sense of common achievement, is “ritualized humiliation and rites of powerlessness” (Bourke 128). Having returned home, the protagonist still hears the sounds of battles in the calm Australian countryside and wakes up weeping after the terrible war scenes that come back to him in his nightmares. The narrator emphasizes that language would fail to describe the horror of war, or “rather, that to describe it would require every word of the language, all of them at once, until they no longer made sense” (115). The available tropes of representation are dysfunctional in the context of war trauma: “the inextricable relationship between discourse and experience has been unsettled in such a way that, instead of experience, there follows a