Beyond the Duality of Perception and Trope: the Representation of Collective Trauma in the Writings of Leonardas Gutauskas

Abstract

Leonardas Gutauskas is one of the few Lithuanian writers who have depicted the collective traumas that befell the Lithuanian nation in the 1950s and 1960s from various angles: the first mass deportations of the citizens of the Republic of Lithuania to Siberia in 1941 and the post-war resistance of the partisans to the occupying USSR army. He has written three works on these topics: the novel Shadows (Šešėliai, 2001), a poem dedicated to Dalia Grinkevičiūtė who created the most famous testimony of the Lithuanian exile (In fine, 2004), and the novel Theology of Dreams (Sapnų teologija, 2006). The article analyses the different narrative strategies that Gutauskas employs in creating these works, which convey the various traumatic experiences of the nation. Taking into account the emphasis in contemporary trauma studies on individual experiences and the non-subsumptive approach to the traumatic experiences (which Finnish philosopher Hanna Meretoja elaborates in her research) as one of the possible ways of narrative development, the article shows that Gutauskas’ prose and poetry reveal themselves as precisely such examples of the non-subsumption of the experience of the Other, in which trauma narratives retain a partial experience of their incomprehensibility, which is valorised as an ethical, uncertainty-opening impetus for narrative emergence, and in which the understanding of the Other’s story emerges as a dialogical human act.