On Blends and Abstractions: Children's Literature and the Mechanisms of Holocaust Representation

Abstract

Critics have long since noted that children's literature of the Holocaust is caught between two binary oppositions: it must offer an emphatic didactic message whilst simultaneously providing an appropriate ‘safe’ distance between the implied reader and the atrocities committed. The result is that texts of this kind frequently consign the most brutal aspects of the story to the periphery of the narrative as a lack and the true horror of the Holocaust is reified in more conceptual forms. In other words, that which is said may be explained by that which is not said. Taking cognitive poetics as my methodological approach, I attempt to illustrate the ways in which the said/not-said binary can be usefully manipulated as a means of facilitating the requirements for both didacticism and appropriate suitability simultaneously. Through an examination of the uses of conceptual integration and metonymy, I demonstrate the power of – and issues surrounding – silence as a means of representation in itself.