Fragments from the Past: Kaniuk's Witnessing and the Poetics of Displacement

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Abstract

In a fragment that was sent by e-mail to his friend Jacob Lavee in January 2008 and later became part of the novel, Kaniuk states that he actually started to write the book in 1949: I began writing it in 1949 when after I was wounded and after I attempted to return to war, pretty Miri, who was a something-officer in the Palmah, decided to transfer me to a ship in order to help me suppress my will to be killed again, and so I worked on the Pan York ship. According to its readers, [the manuscript] was sloppy, badly written, unpolished and tasteless, too vicious and not right enough.1 What did Kaniuk's friends dislike in the text he wrote? INTRODUCTION Extensive theoretical work on trauma and its intersection with literary studies has underscored the association between the encounter with extreme situations and the impossibility or complexity of representing them. Trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Geoffrey Hartman, and Dominick LaCapra all consider that the structure of experience and the pathology of events cannot be fully assimilated by the psyche and are repeatedly replayed in the mind's eye.2 Based on these assessments, trauma theories have examined the power of literature in terms of deviation from realism through devices such as retrospection, deconstruction and reconstruction of memory, repetitions, and fragmentation.3 Fragmentation and the deconstruction of realistic literary norms drive LaCapra's reading of Tadeusz Borowski and Toni Morrison, Felman's reading of Albert Camus's works, and Caruth's reading of Alain Resnais and Ariel Dorfman.4 Stef Craps maintains that "trauma theories often justify their focus on anti-narrative, fragmented, modernist forms of pointing to similarities with the psychic experience of trauma" to create a hierarchy of literary modes favoring texts that disrupt the "conventional mode of representation, such as can be found in modernist art.
Original languageAmerican English
Pages (from-to)114-143
JournalProoftexts - Journal of Jewish Literature History
Volume39
Issue number1
StatePublished - 2021

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