Narrating Rape as a Collective Trauma: Collectivity, Dialogism and Heteroglossia in Monika Fagerholm’s Vem dödade bambi?

This article analyses Finland-Swedish Monika Fagerholm’s novel Vem dödade bambi? [Who killed bambi? my transl.] (2019) as a postmodern, fragmented story where rape is narrated as a collective trauma. In Trauma Studies, collective traumas are studied in conjunction with either the Holocaust (Fareld 2010, Laub 1992) or colonialism (Forter 2014), while the trauma of sexual violence is considered an individual trauma (Brown 1995, Caruth 1996, Tal 1996). Contrary to this, in Fagerholm’s novel, collectivity – both as theme and as form – permeates the novel on at least three levels: Firstly, as a trauma involving a whole small-town community, secondly as subjects constituted by their collectivity, and thirdly on a stylistic level through the use of intertextuality, fragments, dialogism, and heteroglossia. In order to analyse how such a collectivity works in Fagerholm’s rape narrative I turn to Michail Baktin’s narratological concepts dialogism, how the novel as a narrative format consists of several voices; and heteroglossia, the idea of language a process consisting of multiple layers and different narrative positions, combining future and former languages (Bakhtin 1981) as well as to Kristian Shaw’s and Sara Upstone’s use of the feminist narratological term transglossic, how multiple layers in a novel becomes meaningful in that they offer alternatives to established storylines, and the political aspects of such an approach to narrativity (2021). The article shows that rape is narrated as collective on three different levels in Fagerholm’s novel: the collectivity of the small-town community, collectivity within individuals, and collective stylistics. Rape is narrated via Fagerholm’s fragmented style, and this results in a complex narrative structure that reveals how language is part of the collective structures that make rape possible.