The Poetics of Trauma in Two Novels by David Grossman

• In Event: Fragmented Experience: Toward a Poetics of Trauma and Melancholia

Abstract

Recent psychoanalytic work on the concept of Nachträglichkeit (deferred action or après coup), associated with trauma, draws attention to a conception of time that is central to literary experience. The temporal structure of Nachträglichkeit, caught between past and present, can help to understand a more general feature of the mind, the idea that mental life involves a constant return to and reworking of earlier experience. Precisely this ability of the mind to weave together past, present, and future, drawing on events real and imagined, is central to literary experience. Bringing psychoanalysis together with narratology, this paper works with the concept of Nachträglichkeit to explore Grossman’s See Under Love (Ayein Arekh Ahava, 1986) and To the End of the Land (Isha Borakhat meBesorah, 2008), two novels that call upon readers to sort through temporal discontinuities as we piece together coherent histories of the embodied characters who engage our interest. Reading literary texts may evoke in readers echoes of their own unresolved or unassimilated losses, allowing for a kind of temporal reversibility through imagined participation in the scene of representation. Drawing on Nachträglichkeit as a way of conceptualizing the dynamic coherence of a moment of speaking that embodies the past in the present, this paper explores temporality at the level of representation and in the experience of reading narrative texts.

Author

• Anne Golomb Hoffman, Fordham University