Janine Deschenes

ENG 783

Dr. Roger Hyman

April 24, 2015

Thinking Against a "Master Narrative": Ongoing Traumas, Affective

Arrests of Certainty and Calls for Response-ability in Selected

Holocaust Literature

Alison Pick's 2010 book, Far to Go, ends with a postscript

that finishes with the following words, "The train has no

answers, only forward momentum. We open our eyes; it is moving

very quickly now. Moving always ahead. It never arrives" (311,

emphasis mine). These are the final words read in English 783, a

graduate seminar at McMaster University that I had the pleasure

of being involved in. Collectively, we worked through the

difficult project of encountering, and bearing witness to,

Holocaust texts and the histories, peoples and voices that are

silenced by a violent eradication of their lives. A question that

was often asked in the classroom is, "How does one end a trauma

text?". When traumas are pervasive at the individual and

collective levels, is it possible to write an end to a collective

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trauma of such horror and magnitude? Does the "train" ever

arrive? Pick's final words do not signify an ending. Instead,

they call for an embracing of ongoingness and a recognizing that

the goal in thinking through issues is not a resolution- it never

arrives.

In this paper, I will explore the differing ways that

authors in selected course texts call for a response by readers

that requires an ongoing dialogue with traumas and histories, and

unsettles one from certainties. Unsettling from certainty, or

normative, preconceived knowledge allows for an embrace of

multiplicity that moves thinking away from a "Master Narrative".

The notion of a "Master Narrative", as I will conceptualize it

for this essay, is derived from Jean-Francois Lyotard's

definition of the term in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

(1984) who writes of the ways that knowledge is dependent on a

movement toward the end of a "meta narrative", and this narrative

legitimizes particular meanings. This idea is furthered in

respect to history and historical narratives by Hayden White, who

conceptualizes history itself as a constructed narrative in his

essay "The Historical Text as Literary Author". White radicalizes

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thought about the practice of historical writing by arguing that

the historian, through choices of language and framing of an

event, constructs a historical narrative. If notions of history or

historical progress, then, are constructed to reinforce a "Master

Narrative", one can critically examine the sources of such

narratives and the ways that they are representative of the

ideologies of those in positions of power. When such ideologies

normalize "us versus them" mentalities that are then legitimized

or rooted in national histories or knowledge, disastrous effects

are possible. "Master Narratives" also imply a linear or

progressive time line, wherein the past is both separate and

backward in comparison to the present. This devalues the

productive potential of the past for the ways it may facilitate

change in the present and future, and calls for an "ending".

I am therefore interested in the ways that Holocaust

literature, in its call for responses to ongoing and nonlinear

traumatic histories, might disrupt problematic historical

narratives that legitimize particular certainties about

subjectivities, history, progress and trauma. In this paper, I

will explore the different methods through which this call for

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response is put forth, and the different ways that unfinished

traumatic histories of Holocaust victims and their families make

claims on presents and futures. Though there are no clear answers

in respect to ways one might respond to such calls, I ultimately

argue that by acknowledging the ongoingness of traumas, and

embracing a knowledge of feeling, one may be able to align

themselves against certainty, and with the productive potential

of "little narratives".1 I will first consider a theoretical

framework through which I conceptualize the importance of ethical

calls for response and the ways an uncertain knowledge based in

feeling may allow for different potentialities. I will then move

to a close reading of a range of texts studied in the course- The

Second Scroll by A.M. Klein, Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels, Why Should I

Have All the Grief? by Phyllis Gotlieb, Fault Lines by Nancy Huston, East of

Berlin by Hannah Moscovitch, and Far to Go by Alison Pick- in order

to consider the suggestive possibilities present when calls for

response to ongoing histories and traumas are given.

1 My use of the words "little narratives" comes from Pick, who writes in Far to Go, "There are whole libraries full of books on the subject. It is even possible to construct little narratives, to attempt to give the whole thing order." (85).

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Mapping an Exploration: Response-Ability, Community and a

Pedagogy of Feeling

In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History,

Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub ground their study of the

importance of bearing witness and responding to testimony in the

testimonies of Holocaust survivors. In "An Event Without a

Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival" Laub writes that as an

interviewer of Holocaust survivors, and a survivor himself, he

recognizes "an imperative need to tell and thus come to know one's

story " (78), as the Holocaust stands alone as an event that,

"during its historical occurrence [...] produced no witnesses. Not

only, in effect, did the Nazis try to exterminate the physical

witnesses of their crime, but the inherently incomprehensible and

deceptive psychological structure of the event precluded its own

witnessing, even by its victims" (80). By this, Laub refers to

the way that the world of the Holocaust2 was such that it denied

2 I am reminded of the short video clip shown in class of the Nuremburg Trials, wherein a survivor referred to the concentration camp as "Planet Auschwitz". This, similar to Laub's wording, implies a space in which preconceived or normative ways of knowing and being are completely stripped. By denying the victims' subjectivity and ability to call for response, identities or feelings of place in the world are also denied. Thus, this spacemust be an other world.

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the subjectivity of its victims, and silenced their appeals for

recognition or response to such an extent that it became

impossible to bear witness to one's own experiences. If this is

true, and, as Laub suggests, survivors feel compelled to silence

for these reasons, one must turn to alternate ways that testimony

may be given and heard; as without a witness, the suffering of

this event is silenced. I would like to consider how this

"reaching out" is possible in literature. When such testimony

reaches out in literature, there is a call for response that

implicates the reader in the acknowledgement, and carrying

forward, of the traumas of the Holocaust.

Kelly Oliver examines, in Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, the

critical necessity of witnessing that which is beyond recognition,

or outside of normative frameworks of knowledge and subjectivity.

This notion of "beyond recognition" requires, I believe, a

breaking from certainty that was considered in my introduction.

As historical narratives construct, and deconstruct, subjects, it

is important to apprehend that which is outside of preconceived

frameworks of history and subjectivity. Oliver writes that "any

real contact of difference or otherness becomes impossible

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because recognition requires the assimilation of difference into

something familiar" (9). Instead, a witness acknowledges the

testimony of an "other" as a subject, and bears witness to the

subjectivity of the "other's" trauma, therefore creating a

dialogue of address and response. She calls this the response-ability of

a witness. "We are obligated to witness beyond recognition,"

writes Oliver, "to testify and to listen to testimony- to

encounter each other- because subjectivity and humanity are the

result of response-ability" (90). According to Oliver, then, one

is obligated to bear witness and respond to the testimony of

"others", as this opens the possibility to rethink notions of

subjectivity and community. I suggest that, when encountering the

silent and vocalized testimonies of Holocaust victims, survivors

and families, one must break from preconceived notions of history

and subjectivity in order to acknowledge the nonlinear

ongoingness of Holocaust traumas and embrace a "community"

undivided by constructed otherness. This is the way that we, as

witnesses, may bring these traumas into Laub's "knowing".

In Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism, Jonathan

Flatley explores the ways that affective experiences of being

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moved, or estranged, by art can allow for productive potential

and connection to a notion of community. I finally suggest that

the affective experience of encountering Holocaust literature-

that is, the act of bearing witness to Holocaustal traumas and

its disruption of certainty, can provide such an opportunity to

rethink notions of connection and community. Flatley describes

that affective mapping "represents the historicity of one's

affective experience" (4). He suggests that the experience of

being moved by something - here, in literature - opens the

possibility to understand one's sense of involvement and

connection with a broader community or within ongoing histories.

This is the "historicity" of the experience of bearing witness

through literature- by understanding that affect is "experienced

collaboratively" (13), one may experience an openness to

"political problem (such as racism or revolution) that may have

been previously invisible, opaque, difficult, abstract and above

all depressing" (4). The possibility to broaden ideas of

community, then, comes from this process of affective mapping: of

situating one's affective experience with art in its historicity

and connectedness with the emotions of others outside of time.

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This also requires an estrangement from preconceived ideas of

knowledge and history. This experience is what Flatley considers

a moment of arrest; one in which normative ideas of language and

knowledge are unsettled in an estrangement from the self, and a

new way of understanding is opened. Flatley describes, of the

relationship between art - here, literature - and the power of an

arresting affect,

"an aesthetic practice helps with the process of affective mapping [...] through a representation [... that] is accomplished by way of a self-estrangement that allows one to

see oneself in relation to one's affective environment in its historicity, in relation to the relevant social-politicalanchors or landmarks in that environment, and to see the others

who inhabit this landscape with one. [...] By this term [self estrangement] I mean a self- distancing that allows one to see oneself as if from the outside. But I also mean estrangement inthe sense of defamiliarization, making one's emotional life [...]appear weird, surprising, unusual, and capable of a new kind of recognition, interest, and analysis" (80, emphasis mine).

Therefore, bearing witness in order to rethink certainty requires

a breakage in preconceived knowledge, and an embrace of the

difference that exists between subjectivities- some experiences

and voices are unknowable, but need to be acknowledged. I believe

that in order to ethically respond to calls to bear witness to

Holocaustal histories, and act against the structures of

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certainty that perpetuate trauma, a reader must take up Flatley's

estranging practice of affective mapping when encountering and

working through the individual and collective traumas in the

texts. Flatley, further, quotes Walter Benjamin's thesis 2 of "On

the Concept of History" which reads, "Doesn't a breath of air

that pervaded earlier days caress us as well? In the voices we

hear, isn't there an echo of now silent ones?" (73). I am

interested in considering the pasts and voices that echo in

Klein, Michaels, Gotlieb, Huston, Moscovitch and Pick's writing,

and the ways that an affective experience of encountering these

echoes may open a possibility to acknowledge and implicate

ourselves in the ongoingness of Holocaustal traumas, align

ourselves with and across different communities, and apprehend a

communal subjectivity.

"You think I Should do It?"3: Implicating the Reader and Audience

in Hannah Moscovitch's East of Berlin and Nancy Huston's Fault Lines

In her 2009 play East of Berlin, Hannah Moscovitch offers an

opportunity for her audience to make ethical judgements and

consider possibilities for "moving forward" after the Holocaust.

3 (Moscovitch, East of Berlin, 75)

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Rudi is the son of an ex-SS doctor who performed atrocious

medical experiments on concentration camp victims during the

Second World War, and who fled with his wife and son from Germany

to South America courtesy of the ODESSA program, which helped

former SS officers flee Germany when the war ended. Given that

Rudi's father lives a privileged life despite his crimes, the

audience is implicated in making an ethical judgement about evil,

retribution and justice. The audience is given a look into the

everyday of Dr. Henrick's life4, and Moscovitch calls for a

response from the audience in respect to ways we might deal with

the Holocaust's legacies of evil and absence of justice. Rudi

sarcastically questions the audience, "You don't want to hear

this, do you? That he was a good father?" (21) and, regarding the

audience, "I don't know what I should have done. Turned him in?

Yes? Turned him in?" (25). In both instances, Moscovitch

deliberately implicates the audience in making ethical judgements

about evil and justice, and especially whether Rudi's father is

deserving of his freedom.

4 On pages 22-25, Rudi explains to the audience the ways both of his parents justified his father's crimes as being part of a job, forced for the purpose of maintaining the safety of he and his family, or for the purpose of medical breakthroughs.

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There are no simple answers. In Rudi's father, one can see

the banality of evil, a term Hannah Arendt coins in her analysis

of Adolf Eichmann, who stated during the Nuremburg Trials that he

was only obeying orders, and did not bear responsibility.5 Given

that Dr. Henrick uses a similar justification for his crimes,

Moscovitch evokes the difficult history of the Nuremburg Trials

and the judgements that must be made in a post-Holocaust world.

Though the former was able to escape to Paraguay, Moscovitch

implies that such ethical considerations can not be avoided, as

the legacies of the Holocaust pervade generations later. A

notable silence when making these judgements is that of Dr.

Henrick is that of the traumas of his victims. Instead, the

audience is given a look at the ongoing traumas for Holocaust

survivors and their families through Sarah, whose mother survived

Auschwitz. As the audience is not given voices of the victims

themselves, and instead only offered looks into the

intergenerational implications of such trauma, one must bear

witness to the silences beyond recognition that surround

5 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

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Holocaustal experiences because of, what Laub would call, the

impossibility of giving testimony to the event.

Moscovitch therefore blurs lines of justice, evil and

history to show the ways unfinished pasts hold claim on presents

and futures- How does Rudi move forward? Indeed, this is how the

play ends. Rudi, outside his father's house, holds a gun with the

intention of killing his father to make justice for Sarah or

reconcile his position as the son of an ex-SS officer. Moscovitch

ends with Rudy addressing the audience, "You think I should do

it, don't you? You think I should do it? Yes? Yes. Rudi goes to the

door. He looks back at us one more time. He opens the door. In the doorway he pauses,

Then holds the gun up to his head. Blackout. End of play" (75). Ultimately,

Rudy's decision is unknown. However, the audience is implicated

by Rudi's words- "Yes? Yes." regardless of the outcome, in that

the effects of either killing are ongoing, and represent the

pervasive claim the Holocaust makes on the future. We are

therefore implicated in the ongoingness of Holocaustal traumas

and legacies, as ethical judgements fall on those living in a

post-Holocaust world moving forward. As the histories pervade,

these are issues that need an ongoing dialogue of address and

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response, as Oliver would say. There cannot be a moving forward,

but an ongoing working through- as the end of the play suggests,

there is no resolution. Such calls for response cannot be

ignored.

Through a look at intergenerational legacies of traumas,

Nancy Huston's Fault Lines more indirectly implicates readers in the

ongoing traumas and legacies of the Holocaust, and similarly

calls for an response in respect to the ways one might

conceptualize their own ethical role in opposing or perpetuating

certainties6 that facilitate trauma. Each section of the text

offers an anti-chronological look at the lives of a different six

year old family member, therefore historicizing the family within

differing international conflicts coming out of fascism.7

Erra's section shows the everyday life of a German family

during World War Two. Erra, then Kristina, describes playing

"Heil Hitler" with her sister or using the same phrase as a

greeting to other Germans (242,3), showing the normalized and 6 I am indebted to a colleague also in the class for the suggestion that Huston's text unsettles certainties. 7 Sol's 2004 story is set during the United States War on Terror, Randall lives with his family in Haifa during the Lebanon War in 1982, Sadie's life in1962 is set against the Cold War, and Erra is six years old in 1944-45, duringWorld War Two.

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required fascist ideologies in her small town. This "everyday

fascism" extends further to implicate readers in its ongoingness

throughout history. Erra's "grandfather" shows her pictures of

his hometown, Dresden. Huston writes, "He shows me [...] stone

wise men meting out justice on courthouse pediments, stone masks

on the facade of the theatre and opera house, stone Negro slaves

holding up balconies, staircases and windowframes at the Zwinger

palace, their muscles straining and their faces clenched with

effort but he says they're not really suffering because they're

not alive" (240). The "stone Negro slaves" in this photograph

evoke the traumatic histories of colonization projects and the

ways that ideologies that perpetuate hierarchies of privilege and

"otherness" take claim on the present. By drawing readers'

attention to the memorialisation of slavery, readers are asked

to question the "Master Narratives" that legitimized such

traumas. Further, the photograph references "stone wise men"

making judicial judgements, which unsettles notions of justice

when paired with the monuments of slavery. The grandfather's

final line, that the slaves are not suffering because they

"aren't alive" has literal meaning in their being made of stone,

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but also calls to question the ways that fascist ideologies

dehumanize particular lives to legitimize violence against them.

This has terrifying resonances with legitimizations for the

Nazis' plan to exterminate all Jewish people. Huston therefore,

in her use of imagery here, demonstrates the ongoingness of

traumas resulting from colonial mentalities and fascism, and

calls readers to bear witness to those traumas as they flash up

in her writing.

As the text moves from present day back to WWII, readers are

implicated in the ways these traumas are perpetuated throughout

time. Indeed, in Randall's 1982 section Huston critically

examines Israel's killing of refugees in Sabra and Shatila (145),

suggesting that nationalist Zionism may be perpetuating similar

"us versus them" ideologies that led to their own devastation

during the Holocaust. Huston's first section, "Sol, 2004" gives a

look at the ways these ideologies exist in the present, and

legitimize the War on Terror. Sol's father, Randall- who

witnessed the Lebanon War when living in Israel and blamed his

mother's disability on his Muslim friend, Nouzha- "[calls] me

[Sol] in to watch the towers falling down over and over again and

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saying "fucking Arabs" and drinking beer" (10). This shows the

intergenerational legacies of fascist ideologies when they aren't

questioned, but normalized. Huston finally, in the character of

Sol, a boy who believes he is "God" and all powerful (22), gives

an extreme look at the future possibilities when fascist

ideologies are not opposed. "I can be President Bush and God

combined," says Sol, "guzzling google [...] The corpses of Iraqi

soldiers lying in the sand is one of my favourite things to click

on [...] You can see American soldiers standing around them,

looking down at them and thinking There but for the grace of God ... was this

a human being" (11). Huston gives a clear call to the reader to

implicate themselves in the ways fascist national narratives of

"us versus them" are perpetuated and transmitted in present days,

and forces readers to break from normative notions of history,

progress and subjectivity that work to dehumanize the "other" or

give an "end" to past traumas like the Holocaust. By looking at

conflicts throughout time, it is clear that these traumas are

ongoing and must be responded to.

In rethinking such engrained ideologies, readers must

historicize their affective experience of encountering Fault Lines

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in order to understand the ways their contemporary experiences

are connected with other histories, voices, and traumas despite

historical time. Huston forces readers to be implicated in the

normalized fascism that legitimizes and perpetuates traumas by

denying the claim that terrifying Holocaustal mindsets exist only

in the past. Instead, a look at the ways they pervade the present

implicates readers in the "today", calling for a rethinking of

normalized or accepted knowledge about history and progress- if

things have not progressed, as Huston proves, one must turn to

the productive potential that the past offers. One, then, is

called to place fault lines in certainties; to estrange themselves

from preconceived knowledge in order to open broader and more

ethical possibilities for community based on "shared", ongoing

traumas throughout history. According to Kelly Oliver, one is

obligated to bear witness and respond to the testimony of

"others", as this opens the possibility to rethink notions of

subjectivity and community. Huston and Moscovitch show readers

the devastation that occurs when this call for response is

ignored, and implicate readers to estrange themselves from

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normative ignorance in taking up an ongoing witnessing of

histories and traumas that pervade the present.

An Echo of Silent Voices8: Haunted Language and Art in Anne

Michaels' Fugitive Pieces and A.M. Klein's The Second Scroll

A look at the open ended, nonlinear and symbolic language

employed by Michaels and Klein in their respective novels

indicates the authors' acute awareness of the ways that pasts

pervade presents, how Holocaustal traumas are ongoing, and that a

breakage from normative narrative structures is needed to provide

an avenue for response to, and alignment against, certainties.

"Every moment is two moments" (140, 143, 161), repeats Anne

Michaels in Fugitive Pieces, a statement that I believe refers to the

claim that unfinished traumas have on the present.

Anne Michaels' language can be considered problematic for

its subject matter, in that it is aesthetically poetic and

beautiful, yet it deals with unspeakable horror. However, I

believe that her language can be examined for its productive

potential in the sense that it represents multiple meanings,

8 Adapted from Benjamin, "On the Concept of History"

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voices and histories, and requires a breakage from normative

conceptions of linguistic structure. Most clearly, I suggest that

Michaels' language complicates normative linear narrative

structures by merging the past with the present, therefore giving

testimony to ongoing traumas that exist outside of time. She also

tarries with collective traumas of Holocaust victims by calling

readers to bear witness to those silenced histories. Ben, the son

of two Holocaust survivors, describes, "My parents prayed that

the birth of their third child would go unnoticed. They hoped

that if they did not name me, the angel of death might pass by.

Ben, not from Benjamin, but merely “ben” -- the Hebrew word for

son" (253). This quote calls readers to bear witness to that

which is beyond recognition: Ben, unnamed in order to escape

death, represents both the unarticulated traumas experienced by

his parents, and the unrecorded lives of murdered children during

the Holocaust. In this way, unfinished pasts make claims on

present lives. As Michaels writes, further,

“It’s no metaphor to feel the influence of the dead in the world, just as it’s no metaphor to hear the radiocarbon chronometer, the Geiger counter amplifying the faint breathing of

rock, fifty thousand years old. (Like the faint thump from behind the womb wall). It is no metaphor to witness the

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astonishing fidelity of minerals magnetized, even after hundreds of millions of years, pointing to the magnetic pole,

minerals that have never forgotten magma whose cooling off has left them forever desirous. We long for place; but place

itself longs. Human memory is encoded in air currents and river sediment. Eskers of ash wait to be scooped up, lives reconstituted” (53).

Here, Michaels gives a clear indication of the ways that pasts

pervade presents, and make calls for response; "eskers", waiting

to be found. Her language here is rich and poetic, as she delves

into geographic and scientific language to show the

interconnectedness of life, land and history. This passage

indicates the ways her language is cyclical, nonlinear and open

ended- she does not follow normative narrative structures but

rather weaves her words so that they represent multiple

possibilities and bear witness to many histories. This is

furthered when Michaels writes, "The afternoon heat was thick

with burning flesh. I saw the smoke rising in whorls into the

dark sky. Ambushed, memory cracking open. The bitter residue

flying up into my face like ash" (105). Michaels' language here,

explaining a hot day in Toronto, also evokes the unfinished

traumas of Holocaust victims and their ongoing presence in the

world. Therefore, Michaels employs a non-normative linguistic

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structure in order to facilitate an estrangement from the reader

from normative ideas of subjectivity, history and progress. She

calls readers to bear witness to the traumas of those denied

subjectivity, and to disrupt linear notions of history and

narrative and acknowledge the ongoingness of traumatic histories

in the present. Her language embraces multiplicity and open ended

possibility, rather than forecloses meaning or ending as a

"Master Narrative" seeks to achieve. Indeed, Athos' most

consuming project combats the "Master Narrative", showing the

disastrous effects of normalized acceptances of fascism: “Bearing

False Witness plagued Athos. It was his conscious; his record of how

the Nazis abused archaeology to fabricate the past. [...] It

wasn’t enough to own the future. The job of Himmler’s ss -

Ahnenerbe - the Bureau of Ancestral Inheritance - was to conquer

history. The policy of territorial expansion - lebensraum -

devoured time as well as space.” (104). Michaels therefore opens

up her language to embrace the productive potential of "little

narratives"; individual stories that combat projects to

"construct" History.

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In The Second Scroll, A.M. Klein utilizes language similarly;

embracing a multiplicity of meaning and estrangement from

normative linguistic structure. His language represents

indirectness, chaos and openness, which gives a direct unsettling

of "Master Narratives". Klein represents the ongoingness of

Holocaustal traumas in a beautiful passage that reads, "“At times

I feel - so bewildered and burdened is my gratitude - that the

numbered dead run through my veins their plasma, that I must live

their unexpired six million circuits, and that my body must be

the bed of each of their nightmares" (17). Silenced voices,

traumas and lives, here, live on in the body of Uncle Melech, who

is a Holocaust survivor. His "living" their potential lives feels

essential to him. I argue, futher, that Klein is also implicating

readers in this language- that there are unrealized potentials,

unlived lives, means that in order for such lives to come into

subjectivity, one must actively bear witness to them. They do not

exist solely in the past as "finished" histories. Instead,

Klein's use of the words "six million circuits" directly indicates

an ongoingness of these lives despite their physical deaths, and

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these must be carried forward- history cannot write an end to

this trauma.

Perhaps the most compelling example of the ways pasts

pervade presents in Klein's language is in "Gloss Gimel", the

excerpt from a letter sent by Melech Davidson detailing his visit

to the Sistine Chapel. "[S]uch is the nature of art," Klein

observes, "that though the artist entertain fixedly but one

intention and one meaning, that creation once accomplished

beneath his hand, now no longer merely his own attribute, but

Inspiration's very substance and entity, proliferates with

significances by him not conceived not imagined. Such art is

eternal and to every generation speaks with fresh coeval

timeliness" (106). This quote represents Klein's embracing of

open-endedness and multiple meanings of art, and speaks directly

against narratives that seek to create certainties. Melech, then,

"could not look upon those limbs, well fleshed and of the colour

of health [...] without recalling to mind another scattering of

limbs, other conglomerations of bodies the disjected members of

which I had but recently beheld" (107). In this language comes a

crying out of silenced voices and unfinished traumas. Not only is

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time suspended in this reading- pasts, presents and futures are

fused together- but Klein's language also evokes a connectedness

between bodies. There is a vulnerability in flesh, one that

causes "healthy" limbs to become disjected, "heaped and

golgotha'd: a leg growing from its owner's neck, an arm extended

from another's shoulder [...] the human form divine crippled"

(107). Klein therefore not only shows the ways traumas make claim

through art and language, but the ways that there is connection

between all human life; a shared vulnerability in our capacities

to inflict and feel violence at the hands of each other.9 His

language therefore embraces a shared "we", and a multitude of

productive interpretive potentials.

In Michaels and Klein's language, then, pasts, histories and

traumas echo; making each moment for the reader fused with

others. The collective experiences of Jewish peoples seep into

the individual lives of their characters. Their open ended,

nonlinear, chaotic language is haunted by unanswered voices. I

suggest that by bearing witness to the often silenced voices,

histories and traumas, one may align themselves against the

9 I draw this idea directly from Judith Butler, in her 2004 book Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence.

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structures that work to perpetuate traumas by embracing a

pedagogy of feeling. This begs a recognition, according to

Flatley, of the ways that one historicizes their emotional life

within other pasts and histories, allowing for a more broad

notion of community and subjectivity. It also requires a breaking

from normative linguistic or narrative structures that seeks to

write "ends" to such traumas.

Writing an End to Trauma?: Ambiguity and Ongoingness in Phyllis

Gotlieb's Why Should I Have All the Grief and Alison Pick's Far to Go

Given that the Holocaust literature I have studied each

extends a call to the reader to bear witness to ongoing traumas

and oppose ideologies that perpetuate them, I would like to,

finally, consider the ways Phyllis Gotlieb, in Why Should I Have All

the Grief, and Alison Pick, in Far to Go, conceptualize an ethical end

to a Holocaust text.10 Both end their texts with the absence of

an ending- there is no clear finality to the narratives nor does

either author give an answer in respect to how one moves forward.

10 I believe that all of the texts I have focused on in this paper write an ethical, ambiguous end to trauma. I have chosen to examine Gotlieb and Pick for structural reasons, as my wish was to give a look at the differing ways that calls for, and possibilities in achieving, response to trauma come forth in a range of texts.

Deschenes 27

In this ambiguity, however, exists productive potential. The

authors embrace the power of an ongoing and continual process of

address and response to trauma; one which requires a constant

practice of estrangement from certainty and unlearning of

normative or preconceived knowledge about historical narrative,

progress or subjectivity.

Gotlieb's story gives a compelling look at life of Heinz, a

Holocaust survivor and a survivor of domestic abuse by his

father, who is plagued by the memories of his trauma and attempts

suicide later in the text. Much of the text uses similar

nonlinear and chaotic language to that of Klein, especially in

the verbalizations of Heinz's traumatic memories. Again, for

Gotlieb, pasts pervade presents and the ongoingess of Holocaustal

trauma calls for a response; it cannot be ignored, as it returns

despite Heinz's efforts to forget, but must be productively

worked through. Gotlieb's language, too, represents ambiguity and

openness in respect to meaning. On page 113, she writes, "The

hotel was as desolate as a filthy barracks-building behind barbed

wire", evoking imagery that alludes to the concentration camps in

her description of Heinz's hotel, similar to Michaels' connection

Deschenes 28

to crematoriums in her description of a hot, Toronto day.

Ambiguity is especially productive in Gotlieb's ending to

the text. Rather than writing an "end" to Heinz's trauma, as a

linear and progressive notion of historical narrative might seek

to do, Gotlieb maintains ambiguity and potentialities of meaning

in her ending. Gotlieb writes,

"What had he thought about Sara never threatening him? He was being chivvied again, to be, act, exist. There were people in the world who didn't want to mind their own business and let other people lie down and die (a hanged man on a tree, eyes bulge, engorged tongue protrudes, his loosened sphincters betray and foul him); he shivered. The letter. A window, where the evening star might be seen. And a door. 'I'll make some coffee,' said Sara. She went into the kitchen and closed the door. Hope was beating in her so powerfully her teeth were chattering. She waited there, against the door, for the fine thin

sound of the tearing paper" (149).

These last words of Gotlieb's text indicate a waiting that is

occurring- readers are unsure whether Heinz opens the letter from

his brother, something that might presumably offer him peace, or

if he does not. The waiting that is evoked here is important, as

it not only implies the lack of an ending but shows the ways that

legacies of trauma hold claims on the present. Readers, well

aware of Heinz's suicide attempt preceding this chapter and

Deschenes 29

Sara's failure to understand Heinz's trauma, are given a dismal

image of Heinz's mind space before the end. However, the text

ends with the possibility of hope. Perhaps Gotlieb leaves this

open in order to suggest to the reader that working through

Holocaustal trauma is difficult, and requires encountering death,

but there are productive possibilities when such a project is

undertaken. Despite Gotlieb's intended meaning, her deliberate

ambiguous ending leaves the possibility for multiple "little

narratives" to come, evoking an ongoingness and the need for a

dialogue of address and response post-trauma.

My multiple uses of the phrase "little narratives" comes

from Alison Pick's Far to Go. Pick details the struggle of Annelise,

a historian, to put together the lives of her family from small

fragments. She finds this project impossible- the only way to

reconcile her quest for peace in "knowing" is to construct

"little narratives". On page 85, she writes "There are whole

libraries full of books on the subject. It is even possible to

construct little narratives, to attempt to give the whole thing

order [...] People disappear. Despite all of the information

available to us, there are cases that are never solved. We can

Deschenes 30

guess what happened but we cannot say for certain. And there is

nothing to be done about it anyway." Pick, here, does not

discount the hope that exists in establishing an "order" from the

chaos, as she recognizes her own desire to do so and the healing

potential this might offer. She writes, "It was my hope, in the

last year of my half-brother's life, to construct some kind of

narrative, a story for him to hang on to" (287). Pick therefore

conceptualizes individual narratives as having healing potential

for those who live in chaos. In class, we also spoke about the

possibility that Pick is calling we as readers to construct order

from the chaos. I believe, though, that Pick privileges a

particular kind of order- one that is individual, that creates

"little narratives" rather than contributes to a collective

"Master Narrative" that seeks to speak truths about history.

Instead, when one embraces the impossibility to construct truths

and instead privileges "little narratives", an ethical working

through chaos may be possible. Indeed, the text, save for the

postscript, ends with a concern for posterity; a reaching out to

future generations to continue valuing and constructing "little

narratives" in order to combat certainty. Pick writes, "In the

Deschenes 31

end, though, all I have is a list of names and dates. And so I

inscribe them here, the family I never knew. It might seem morose

to end with the dead, but I am thinking of posterity. I don't

have to tell you the reason for this. Soon there'll be nobody

left to remember" (308). We are, I argue, obligated to remember,

and to respond with and through "little narratives".

Though there cannot be a collective resolution, nor a

narrative end to ongoing Holocaustal trauma, the construction of

little narratives can allow one to bear witness to traumas and

place value on silenced lives. In doing so, little "truths"

unsettle the certainties of "Master Narratives". By embracing

such projects, one may realize the productive potential of the

past, and respond to its call in an ethical way- one that does

not foreclose an ending, but embraces an ongoing working through.

Concluding Remarks

In Pick's text, her final words - and the final words read

in this course - describe a train that "never arrives". Rather

than moving toward some kind of resolution, this quote- in its

imagery that shows the unending movement of trains, the mass

Deschenes 32

transport of Jewish and other peoples to concentration camps

during World War Two- is instead representative of the ways that

pasts pervade presents and futures, and how unanswered claims

call for response. "Little narratives", then, do not require an

ending, but an ongoing working through to allow the possibility

for change. Through a close look at six Holocaust texts studied,

I believe that in order to respond, an estrangement from

certainty or preconceived ideas of knowledge, history, progress

and subjectivity is essential, as this allows the possibility to

embrace a pedagogy of feeling- one that conceptualizes community

based on connectedness outside of time.

I believe Moscovitch, Huston, Michaels, Klein, Gotlieb and

Pick write to transmit the generative potential of the past, and

call readers to- intentionally or unintentionally- bear witness

to these pasts in order to recognize the ways pasts can offer

change in the present. Perhaps this raises more questions than

answers; more challenges than achievements. In what other ways

does the past make claim on the present? How does one estrange

from the self? Regardless, I believe that by acknowledging a call

for estrangement, in order to implicate oneself in a subjectivity

Deschenes 33

that can only be collective, one may come to ethically respond to

Holocaust texts by aligning against "Master Narratives".

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Edition. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. Print.

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence.

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Felman, Shoshana. "Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of

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Flatley, Jonathan. Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of

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Gotlieb, Phyllis. Why Should I Have All the Grief?. Toronto: MacMillan,

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Huston, Nancy. Fault Lines. New York: Black Cat, 2007. Print.

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Deschenes 34

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