Abstract
Even today, trauma theory remains indebted to Sigmund Freud’s notion of belatedness: a traumatic event is not fully experienced at the time of occurrence, due to its suddenness and the lack of preparedness on the part of the human subject. In Traumatic Realism (2000), Michael Rothberg invokes the Benjaminian notion of the constellation of representation to address the shortcomings of any singular mode of trauma portrayal. Rothberg likens the realist, modernist, and postmodernist literary modes to the points of view of the survivor, the bystander, and the latecomer, respectively. I combine Rothberg’s typology with insights from trauma theory to analyze Elie Wiesel’s Night, Wolfgang Borchert’s The Man Outside, and W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants—three texts that represent Rothberg’s literary modes while at the same time problematizing genre. Dori Laub argues that distorted memory and untold stories are endemic to Holocaust representation. W.G. Sebald inscribes this distortion into his narratives, calling attention to but also repeating its effects. I argue that a perspective beginning with (but not limited to) a combined reading of these three texts yields a more complete understanding of trauma and the Holocaust than can be offered by any singular genre—even archives of documented testimonies, which, despite their necessary role, are unavoidably fraught with a problematics of memory itself.
Highlights
As the number of living Holocaust survivors diminishes, society’s contact with this trauma becomes increasingly vicarious and necessitates an invigorated engagement in order to preserve its experiential, in addition to its historical, memory
This essay investigates the benefits of an inter-generic approach to the literary representation of trauma, considering the cases of Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night (La Nuit 1958), Wolfgang Borchert’s radio play/drama The Man Outside
I argue that the first two of these modes convey ‘post-trauma’ effectively, and that postmodernism adds the ‘post-post-trauma’ perspective to this typology—inherently both advantageous and difficult in its point of view regarding trauma, highlighting its own deficiencies as well as those of documentary/(anti)realist testimony and of modernism. These texts by no means form a complete picture of the typology of trauma representation, in which each source contributes to what might be visualized as a constellation
Summary
As the number of living Holocaust survivors diminishes, society’s contact with this trauma becomes increasingly vicarious and necessitates an invigorated engagement in order to preserve its experiential, in addition to its historical, memory. I argue that the first two of these modes convey ‘post-trauma’ effectively, and that postmodernism adds the ‘post-post-trauma’ perspective to this typology—inherently both advantageous and difficult in its point of view regarding trauma, highlighting its own deficiencies as well as those of documentary/(anti)realist testimony and of modernism These texts by no means form a complete picture of the typology of trauma representation, in which each source contributes to what might be visualized as a constellation. 20) in the sense that all photographs achieve a return of the past, and in its connection to the trauma of the Holocaust This is the primary operative mode of both the images and the text of Sebald’s The Emigrants: the narratives approach trauma through contextualization rather than through content alone. I begin to connect the points in an interpretive constellation for the representation of Holocaust trauma in Wiesel’s, Borchert’s, and Sebald’s texts
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