“The Ghost Language Which Passes between the Generations”: Transgenerational Memories and Limit-Case Narratives in Lisa Appignanesi’s Losing the Dead and The Memory Man

Silvia Pellicer-Ortín

doi:10.3390/h9040132

Abstract

This article aims to uncover the tensions and connections between Lisa Appignanesi’s autobiographical work Losing the Dead (1999) and her novel The Memory Man (2004) and to point out that, in spite of belonging to different genres, they share several formal, thematic, and structural features. By applying close-reading and narratological tools and drawing on relevant theories within Trauma, Memory, and Holocaust Studies, I would like to demonstrate that both works can be defined as limit-case narratives on the grounds that they blur literary genres, fuse testimonial and narrative layers, include metatextual references to memory and trauma, and represent and perform the transgenerational encounter with traumatic memories. Moreover, Appignanesi’s creations will be contextualised within the trend of hybrid life-writing narratives developed by contemporary British-Jewish women writers. Accordingly, these authors are contributing to the expansion of innovative liminal autobiographical and fictional practices that try to represent what it means to be a Jew, a migrant, and an inheritor of traumatic experiences in the post-Holocaust world. Finally, I launch a further reflection on the generic hybridisation characterising those contemporary narratives based on the negotiation of transgenerational memories, which will be read as a fruitful strategy to problematize the conflicts created when the representation of the self and (family) trauma overlap.

Highlights

The Memoir Boom, Limit-Case Autobiographies, and British-Jewish Women. It was at the turn of the millennium that the humanities witnessed what Andreas Huyssen described as an “obsession with the issue of memory” (Huyssen 1995, p. 9), which produced a “memory boom of unprecedented proportions” (p. 5), the consequences of which are still traced in those contemporary literary practices that portray memory as a site of contradictions
Lisa Appignanesi’s memoir and novel will be discussed in order to ascertain the extent to which the ghosts of her parents’ experiences motivated her to create limit-case narratives, which challenge the representation of the self against inherited traumatic memories
The narrative contains another journey within this journey: the one. Bruno undertakes with his daughter and friends to Krakow in Chapter Five, which culminates in the visit to his father’s unmarked grave in the concentration camp. Episodes like these show that these journeys are made of various entangled layers that complicate the processes of memory “excavation”: the journey into the parents’ past by visiting the protagonists’ homeland (Poland, in both cases); the revisiting of the main characters’ childhood; and the journeys into the protagonists’ unconscious, which give access to their lived or inherited repressed traumatic memories, culminating in the writing journey on which Appignanesi embarked when she decided to transcribe her fragmented memories into textual artefacts

Summary

Introduction

It was at the turn of the millennium that the humanities witnessed what Andreas Huyssen described as an “obsession with the issue of memory” (Huyssen 1995, p. 9), which produced a “memory boom of unprecedented proportions” (p. 5), the consequences of which are still traced in those contemporary literary practices that portray memory as a site of contradictions. Of all the groups that have been interested in coming to terms with issues of diaspora, exile, and trauma, in relation to the Holocaust, Jewish communities in particular have tried to reconstruct their diasporic history and memory through multifarious writing practices. As such, they have produced works impregnated by a deep sense of dislocation (Jelen et al 2011). Process of coming to terms with the inherited (hi)stories of the Second World War and the Holocaust These liminal autobiographical practices tend to raise questions about the Jewish identity of their protagonists and the transgenerational transmission of trauma that occurs among the members of the families represented. Lisa Appignanesi’s memoir and novel will be discussed in order to ascertain the extent to which the ghosts of her parents’ experiences motivated her to create limit-case narratives, which challenge the representation of the self against inherited traumatic memories

Trauma and Belatedness

Multivocality and the Blurring of Boundaries between Author and Narrator

The Journey as a Symbol and Structural Device

The Transgenerational Transmission of Holocaust Memories