Apocalyptic Writing, Trauma and Community in Imre Kertész's Fateless

The so-called “trauma tum” in literary and sociological theory draws on a psychoanalytic inquiry, which rearticulates the subject’s catastrophic experience as a valid object of philosophical, ethical and political reflection. This literary and theoretical take on trauma has been credited by some with, as well as criticized by others for, infusing Holocaust history and memory with the aesthetics of sublimity. ¹ This aestheticizing move conditions semantic constructions that attach eschatological significance to historical events termed “catastrophic.” The sublime quality of the catastrophic representation intersects here with the idea of excessive terror, which – in Lyotard’s re-reading of the Kantian sublime – testifies to an unmanageable accumulation of what is “unpresentable” (Lyotard 78–80). This means that while the Lyotardian ideas of excess and terror engender attempts at articulating the catastrophic sublime, they also indicate that any references to reason as the unifying origin of such representations are necessarily unsuccessful and subverted.