Reading Trauma and Memory

In recent years, complicity studies have expanded rapidly. Focussing on failures of witnessing, wilful blindness and culpable ignorance, Ivan Stacy's The Complicit Text makes a significant contribution to this burgeoning field. Lucidly argued and accessibly written, the volume expands our understanding of and our ability to recognise complicity mainly but not exclusively as it relates to cultural production. The theoretical framework provides an intelligent and fresh interpretive angle to key works by Albert Camus, Milan Kundera, Kazuo Ishiguro, W.G. Sebald and Margaret Atwood, while implicitly inviting us to probe our own relation to collective moral wrongdoing.

In this ground-breaking study, Ivan Stacy reassesses the significance of complicity, as a kind of responsibility beyond that of a bystander, yet not quite that of a perpetrator, within a cultural context. He does so by means of careful and convincing analyses of novels that make visible failures to confront or even to acknowledge wrong-doing, in contexts ranging from the Holocaust and the Cold War to ecological emergency and the injustices of neoliberalism. This study is as timely as it is innovative, on a topic that concerns us all.

The Complicit Text explores a stunning central premise: the complicity of ordinary individuals in systems of wrongdoing, if not oppression, may be a more general feature of the human experience than many people like to imagine. Ivan Stacy's incisive and highly accessible case studies identify notable works of literature as conceptual resources for contemplating the limits or failures of witnessing, narrative, and testimony in the face of one's potentially undeniable complicity. The result is a vital scholarly study that not only draws new significance from important works of literature, but does so in ways that address the timely question of how we should narrate our degrees of complicity in present-day oppression, violence, and injustice.