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".
Works Cited
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, 2nd
Edition. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. Print.
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence.
Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2004. Print.
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,
1969. Print.
Huston, Nancy. Fault Lines. New York: Black Cat, 2007. Print.
Klein, A.M. The Second Scroll, New Canadian Library 2nd Edition.
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2009. Print.
Deschenes 34
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: a report on knowledge.
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Michaels, Anne. Fugitive Pieces. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart,
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Oliver, Kelly. "Introduction", "Chapter 4: The Necessity and
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Pick, Alison. Far to Go, 2nd Edition. Toronto: House of Anansi
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