Cirrus@Austlit

'In this article I engage trauma theory to analyse the narrative strategies that Morgan Yasbincek deploys in the novel 'liv' (2000). I demonstrate how Yasbincek makes the expression of creative emergence from catastrophically fracturing intergenerational trauma significant as a theme and a process and how the text makes this imaginatively and effectively available to the reader. I analyse the representation in 'liv' of the paradox inherent in the traumatic shattering of subjectivity and the ensuing reconstruction of identity facilitated through creative writing, where the imperative to create enables an oblique access to the foreclosed traumatic experience.

''liv' is a fictionalised account of a family's Croatian-Australian migration and, although it was short-listed for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 2000, and commended by the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards of the same year, critical analysis of the work has to date been limited. The narrative is enacted through a heteroglossia that is foregrounded through the use of stylistic fragments that perform the temporality of the intergenerational and traumatic memory and dis-continuity. 'liv' shows how intergenerational trauma manifests and has its effect attenuated as emergent subjectivity forms through creative endeavour.' (Publication abstract)