ABSTRACT

The exact balance of trauma’s psychic and physical assault in considering trauma continues to provoke debate, and the extremity of both in the case of the Holocaust might make it appear to be the condition’s “ultimate” expression. The significance of the Holocaust is therefore not its static paradigmatic status in relation to traumatic representation, but its offering a multidirectional or palimpsestic way in which to conceptualize the legacy of other atrocities. In the realm of novelistic Holocaust literature, examples which break away from conventional and realist narrative forms in their efforts to represent a traumatized subjectivity are surprisingly unusual. In terms of the traumatic recurrence of Holocaust memory, the narrator’s surviving to relate this story, about the end of individual lives and of a culture, as well as any teleological view of human progress, is not triumphant or reassuring but remains “in the darkness”.