A Trauma-Theoretical Reading of Hugues C. Pernath's War Poetry

Abstract

Summary Dominick LaCapra has pointed out that from a trauma-theoretical perspective definitions which are too generally formulated lead to an unstable distinction between victim and commentator. According to LaCapra, the idea that “contemporary culture, or even all history, is essentially traumatic or that everyone in the post-Holocaust context is a survivor” is dubious (LaCapra 2001: x-xii). If LaCapra's findings are interpreted in a narrow sense, only Holocaust victims meet the criteria for traumatic experience. The aim of this article, which focuses on the poetry of the canonical Flemish poet, Hugues C. Pernath (1931-1975), is to establish a pertinent definition that will justify the inclusion of literary projects by certain post-war poets within trauma-theoretical discourse. Pernath was so moved by visiting Auschwitz and living with a Jewish survivor that his notions about humanity were fundamentally shaken. This rupture in his world view, which is also reflected in his poetry, can thus be called traumatic. However, Pernath's poetry has never before been examined within this conceptual framework. Through the analysis of selected texts, this paper attempts to show how a writer who has not directly suffered the scarring consequences of war may nonetheless bear testimony to such a traumatic experience. The article argues that the specific idiom of the poet, with its interrupted syntax, elliptical sentence structures, semantic ambivalences, and various hitches in the text, as well as the handling of silences, reveals his central concern with problematising conventional communication in the face of trauma.