“Everything was losing definition and outline”: Re-membering Trauma Fiction in Gail Jones’s Sorry

In an article, Australian novelist and essayist Gail Jones confesses of her novel Sorry that it has “a political-allegorical aspect – as one would expect, claiming such a title” (2008, 79). Published in 2007, that is, one year prior to the formal apology delivered by the Australian government to the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, Sorry engages in a reflection on the ethics of reconciliation. Written in response to Jones’s wish to acknowledge the debt to the Stolen Generations, the novel also offers new possibilities of ethical mourning, allowing the dead to return and the voiceless to speak.
My paper will seek to explore the ways in which Jones draws on trauma fiction to bypass not only the unsayable dimension of Australia’s history and what she elsewhere criticises as the trauma model’s “transferential gesture of victim surrogacy” symptomatic of postcolonising settler cultures (2004, 162) but also the representational difficulties inherent in trauma. Moreover, it is by introducing into her novel the concept of traumatic time, “a time that is broken, and […] recursive” (qtd. in Block 2008) and which mirrors on the level of form and structure the effects that trauma exerts on its victims, that Jones she recreates a narrative model that echoes an Australian discourse pre-dating the Bringing Them Home report – that is tinged with amnesia, fragmented memories, and silence –, against which she will assert her own counter-discourse.

Works Cited:
- Block, Summer. 09 May 2008. “Interview: Gail Jones.” Interview. January Magazine. Web. 16 Jan. 2013.
- Jones, Gail. 2004. “Sorry-in-the-Sky: Empathetic Unsettlement, Mourning, and the Stolen Generations.” In Imagining Australia: Literature and Culture in the New New World, edited by Judith Ryan and Chris Wallace-Crabbe, 159-171. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Jones, Gail. 2007. Sorry. London: Harvill Secker.
- Jones, Gail. 2008. “Speaking Shadows: Justice and the Poetic.” In Just Words?: Australian Authors Writing for Justice, edited by Bernadette Brennan, 76-86. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.