«Noah's Ark» by Halyna Hordasevych: How Metaphor Reveals Trauma

Abstract

The subject of the research in this article is a metaphor that reveals unresolved trauma. The process of metaphorization is part of shaping a trauma narrative, in which metaphor works as a protective mechanism that allows one not to talk about the traumatic experience directly, but still talk about it. The purpose of this research is to demonstrate how, in fiction about traumatic experiences, metaphor can seem like a way to give meaning to events, but instead highlights the inability to express personal experience. The methodological basis of the research is trauma studies, in particular the works of K. Carut, M. Wilkinson, B. Van der Kolk, K. Brewin, V. Williams. Literary studies by J. Anker and T. Grebeniuk were also productive for the analysis of the problem. The relevance of the study is determinate by the need to study the peculiarities of the trauma narrative, in particular, based on the material of the literature about the Second World War.

As a result of the analysis of H. Hordasevych’s story “Noah’s Ark”, it was concluded that metaphor in a traumatic text can be the category that determines narrative features and generates meaning even when the story itself has already ended. The metaphor of “Noah’s Ark” compares the life of Father Hilary’s family during the occupation to the Old Testament story. War is depicted as a natural disaster (flood) and punishment for sins. The priest’s house, where representatives of various national and social groups gather, is likened to an ark, and Ukraine’s independence should become a rainbow after the flood. At the same time, the metaphor of Noah’s ark reveals an incompleteness in the text — the narrator stops the story before the end of the flood, refusing to talk about the fact that salvation did not happen. This incompleteness of the metaphor marks the trauma — the inability to talk about the loss of family, social group, and national environment. That is, the story about the war and the occupation managed to be embodied in a coherent narrative, but the story about the arrival of Soviet power and its consequences was left out of the text. A frozen metaphor allows the narrative to begin, but the discrepancy between the known pretext and reality prevents it from continuing and verbalizing the trauma. At the same time, it is the metaphor that marks the existence of trauma, a silenced experience that the author is unable to translate into a story. The motive of silence as a consequence of trauma is accentuated by its thematization in the text.