Writing trauma : affected in the act

Writing is an affective process. When the writer writes creatively it is the affective response in the word choice and its resonance for the text's forms and patterns, and other words around it, that determine language use (Freiman 2009: 5). Yet this resonance does not occur solely within the text, nor even between text and reader. Writing entails not only the expression of affect, but the writer's experience of it. Or, as Elspeth Probyn (2010: 86) puts it, as we write affects can seem to get into our bodies. Such contagious affect becomes not a representation of the other, but a rendering (Gibbs 2010: 193). Not only does the writer create the body of the text, the text changes the writing body - particularly when the writing itself is intensely affective. Drawing on the affect theories of Gilles Deleuze and Silvan Tomkins, this paper theorises these affective relations of writer and traumatic text. What emerges is a theoretical yet visceral account of transformative resonance of affect in the co-constitutive encounter of writing body and body of text.