Rewriting the Past: Gerard Mannix Flynn’s Nothing to Say and James X

If, as Anne Whitehead suggests, the term ‘trauma fiction’ represents a paradox, that violence resists containment through language, then writers who engage and attempt to represent traumatic events in their work can never fully render the horror of trauma through their writing. Yet artists such as Gerard Mannix Flynn, a survivor of trauma himself, still attempt to translate the experience of trauma into language. In the novel Nothing to Say and the play James X, Flynn explores the ways in which trauma is both experienced and recalled and the cathartic effects that ‘containing’ trauma through language can have. The impetus to write, to express the trauma one has suffered through language, offers the victim agency over his or her own narrative. The agency that the trauma survivor gains is not literal; rather, they have finally gained control over what Cathy Caruth identifies as the ‘haunting power’ of repressed trauma, and in doing so are able to take the first steps towards recovery. In both works, Flynn attempts to traverse the paradox that Whitehead presents: he attempts to represent that which is deemed unrepresentable, and put the violence inflicted upon the protagonists into words.