"... the credentials that would rescue me": Trauma and the Fraudulent Survivor

Abstract

The author of present study juxtaposes accounts by postmemory individuals with fraudulent works of Binjamin Wilkomirski (Bruno Dossekker) and Jerzy Kosinski. Analyzing both phenomena as representa- tive of dynamics at work in memory of and of other traumatic events, author arrives at a formulation, via Giorgio Agamben, of aporia (contradiction) that lies behind both legiti- mized and illegitimated. Once a writer is authenticated by publisher and public, he or she obtains ethical and historical authority. But if that authentication should fall into doubt—if shades of fiction, adaptation, and imagination become discernable—then, author beware. The trauma memoir moves from chaos of experience to regulation and textual qualities of an account, and thereby is founded on a contradiction: trauma is a subjective experience, but once it becomes an account, it often is taken as objective truth. The 1970s and early 1980s were a period of profiles, journal essays, literary awards, and honorary doctorates for Jerzy Kosinski, who in 1965 had published The Painted Bird, near-iconic memoir that was later shown to be fiction. But since his suicide in 1991, Kosinski's life and work have served either as anecdotal evidence for those who claim that memory of the Holocaust is threa- tened by discrediting of such prominent Holocaust-associated cultural figures, or as occasions for apologia by those who had previously credited them. James Park Sloan's 1996 biography has become something of epigraph, depicting a mendacious storyteller with illicit sexual interests and high-society friends, and a man whose literary output qualifies him as little better than also-ran. Today Kosinski surfaces in literary culture either as caricature (for example in Davey Holmes's 2001 play More Lies About Jerzy) or as cipher for cautionary tales and critical scorn. 1