2014, Botez, Catalina

Europe’s architectural ruins and urban blend of past and present are thematised in W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz as both localisers of memory and metaphors of human trauma. Together with the written, archival testimonies, on the one hand, and the unwritten, human memory, on the other, the fictional urban sites depicted in this novel ( i.e. the London streets and tube stations, the Antwerpen, Luzern and Paris train stations, the former Prague ghetto and many other ruins and fortress walls) still bear the wounds of combat, oppression and murder. Discovered through a complex process of archeological reconstruction and identification, these public places help reconstruct a harrowing personal story of self-loss and self-discovery.

Jacques Austerlitz is now a professor of architecture, a British citizen plagued - at the end of his career - by the crisis of non-identity. His travels take him around Europe for assiduous research and careful observation of historical ruins and architectural wonders, while he himself is haunted by the eerie feeling of something essential missing from his life. It is when he decides to retrace the train trip back to his native Czech Republic from London (via Germany) that early childhood memories - thought dead - start coming back to him. The map of his estrangement as a child refugee during WWII is now reconstructed step by step, with a double climax in Prague and Paris, two urban spaces still imbued with trauma, where he tracks down elements of his parents’ own story of deportation and death at the Nazis’ hand.

This paper proposes, therefore, to explore the archeology of trauma as a sum of fragmented stories preserved and transmitted by architectural relics as a reassembled whole, one that carries, compliments and sometimes replaces human memory. Although materially tangible and more reliable than the often elusive human memory, these soulless sites of trauma fail nevertheless to provide that soothing, reassuring element so necessary to closure and human healing.

2013, Botez, Catalina

In this article I explore Raymond Federman’s Post-Holocaust narrative 'The Voice in the Closet' from the perspective of Viktor Shkovsky’s formalist theory of “defamiliarization of reality”. I argue that the dissolution of language and syntax, along with structural disorder and issues of perspective such as blended, almost undistinguishable narrative voices, contribute to deconstruct the trauma of survivorship and work towards comprehension and healing. These extreme formal strategies challenge the reader to actively participate in an innovative, albeit controversial type of literariness, which uses paradox, absurdity, repetition and specific symbolism as further means to defamiliarise and re-order cataclysmic events. Additionally, I contend that the metatextual approach involved in the process of fictionalising lived experience fuels the debate related to the abstractisation of memory and to the legitimacy of rewriting memory into autobiographic fiction. I also maintain that the interaction of the child survivor’s narrative voice with that of the adult narrator’s autobiographic ruminations speaks for the post-traumatic splitting of the self, which also functions as a de-habituation of the reader from mainstream perceptions of survivorship.

2011, Botez, Catalina

The dynamics of silence and silencing in Australian writer Lily Brett’s autobiographic fiction Things Could Be Worse reflects the crisis of memory and understanding experienced by both first and second-generation Holocaust survivors within the diasporic space of contemporary Australia. It leads to issues of handling traumatic and transgenerational memory, the latter also known as postmemory (M. Hirsch), in the long aftermath of atrocities, and problematises the role of forgetting in shielding displaced identities against total dissolution of the self.

This paper explores the mechanisms of remembrance and forgetting in L. Brett’s narrative by mainly focusing on two female characters, mother and daughter, whose coming to terms with (the necessary) silence, on the one hand, and articulated memories, on the other, reflects different modes of comprehending and eventually coping with individual trauma.

By differentiating between several types of silence encountered in Brett’s prose (that of the voiceless victims, of survivors and their offspring, respectively) I argue that silence can equally voice and hush traumatic experience, that it is never empty, but invested with individual and collective meaning.

Essentially, I contend that beside the (self)damaging effects of silence, there are also beneficial consequences of silence, in that it plays a crucial role in emplacing the displaced, rebuilding their shattered self, and contributing to their their reintegration, survival and even partial healing.

2009, Botez, Catalina

This paper takes up a comparative view on individual identity as featured in three literary works that deal with traumatised Jewish youth in the aftermath of the Holocaust: Imre Kertesz’ Fateless (1992), Anne Michael’s Fugitive Pieces (1997), and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2002). As I intend to show, the trauma of the Holocaust forces an arbitrary process of identity deconstructionupon the juvenile characters’ incompletely developed selves, which triggers in their adult lives a need for self-reconstruction, essentially experienced against thoroughly altered cultural, historical and geographical backgrounds. These characters’ initial flight for their lives and concurrent transgression of various national borders, with all the tribulations that they entail, will be regarded as complex steps towards mapping a physical trajectory of inner change. Ultimately, this survival journey will be retraced and re-mapped in old age in an attempt to reconstruct, negotiate and reconcile with an original identity.
Indubitably, forceful migration engenders a break with former patterns of selfhood and generates a re-shifting of identity elements such as the cultural, ethnical, national, psychological and geographical. Particularly, post-war Jewishness differs from its pre-war analog through the change of emphasis onto the ethnic element, as opposed to other identity constituents. The prevalent prevailing ethnic factor is the lens through which these characters later perceive their rapidly changing time and space, while their mature interest for poetry, literary discourse and architecture expresses an inner need to assume and incorporate this change. Comparatively, this focus on ethnicity will be regarded against current views of plural identity affiliation and multiple membership, in an attempt to enquire into the extent to which these destinies strike an incipient balance between localism and cosmopolitanism, exclusion and inclusion, alterity and sameness.
My purpose is to explore the physical and emotional distance between the deconstructed and reconstructed types of Jewishness as embodied by these fictional characters, and to stress the uniqueness of their physical and mental path back to themselves.

2014, Botez, Catalina

In my article on Anne Michaels' fictional work Fugitive Pieces, I introduce the critical concept of liquefaction as thematic leitmotiv that connects psychological, transgenerational trauma to large-scale environmental catastrophes (like floods and hurricanes) across time and place, and across international, national and domestic spaces. Through this central trope, I show how psychological post-traumatic healing in Holocaust survivors and geologic post-traumatic healing operate in tandem in the novel, more precisely how the figurative unearthing and working through of traumatic memory across generations parallels the literal unearthing and re-situating of archaeological artefacts across geologic time. The interconnectedness of psychological wounds with geological wounds demonstrates the ethics of nature - a kind of co-healing of persons and places across generations and landscapes (both transgenerational and transhistorical). I also point out the restitutive ethics of nature and maintain that floods manifest themselves as counterhistoric agents able to reveal and restore historic truth through obscuration and disclosure.

2012, Botez, Catalina

This chapter is looking at Italian writer Primo Levi’s most original work Il sistema periodico (1975), translated in English as The Periodic Table (1995), which engages in a fascinating manner with the overlapping spheres of (auto)biography, memoir, poetical myth and fiction. This compelling literary hybrid mingles landmarks of personal pre- and post-WWII experience with significant fictitious tales, mapped around elements of Mendeleev’s periodic table.
The concept that binds all twenty one stories together is ‘work,’ understood on the one hand as physical, hands-on work in either the concentration camp, chemical laboratory or paint factory, and on the other hand as intellectual effort of narrating, writing and making sense of a particular traumatic (hi)story. This analysis explores the potential of integrous work to restore human rectitude and alleviate the memory of offence, seen here as transgressive memory. By hypostatizing the Holocaust survivor and writer as homo faber and homo scribendus, combined under the notion of technological man in the historico-philosophical understanding of the term, I suggest that P. Levi re-works and re-writes experience into a discourse of identity rehabilitation through research. Thus, personal experience and scientific research, along with fiction writing, gain ethical meanings.
From Argon to Carbon, going through Phosphorous, Lead and Cerium (three chemical components most intricately related to Levi’s camp experience), the reader is borne through the circle of life itself, incomplete without the occurrence of death. This organicist view on and evaluation of life does not erase individual responsibility -and therefore human probity-, just as it does not avert thoughts and ethical dilemmas regarding the significance of technologically perpetrated genocide and the role of work and (historical or scientific) research in inflicting, preventing and recovering from it.

2011, Botez, Catalina

This paper explores the tensions between (post)memory and amnesia as interlacing themes around which Sebald’s transnational narrative Austerlitz is constructed. It examines the identitarian space of the eponymous character as traversing psychic, emotional, mnemonic and comprehension boundaries at both personal and collective levels. Austerlitz is simultaneously torn between a dormant memory and the lack thereof, as also between partial remembrance and the devastating effects of post-mnemonic revelations. His self-awareness hinges on an investigation of the unfathomable enormity of the Holocaust and other forms of panhistoric violence, whose ubiquitous traces across Europe’s urban space are imprinted in the architectural and geographic layout of individual and transnational “cumulative trauma” (M. Khan). The paradox engendered by the overarching mobility of Austerlitz’s cross-temporal and spatial journeys, on the one hand, and his increasing feelings of entrapment and traumatic motionlessness, on the other, evokes in fact the problematic balance between memory and amnesia as “apathic nonexistence” (Khan). His “haunting legacy” of loss (G. Schwab, 2010) also prompts an exploration of the devastating impact of long-term suppression, while also tackling memory’s ineluctable potential for destruction. Sebald thus addresses the possibilities of living both with memory and without it, and investigates the limits of the ensuing physical and mental pain. This paper proposes, therefore, an analysis of the dialectics of transnational and cosmopolitan movement, on the one hand, and the inner paralysis, on the other, with reference to Holocaust trauma and postmemory in Sebald’s transnational prose Austerlitz.

2013, Botez, Catalina

Europe’s architectural ruins and urban blend of past and present are thematised in W.G. Sebald’s novel 'Austerlitz' as both localisers of memory and metaphors of human trauma. Together with the written, archival testimonies, on the one hand, and the unwritten, human memory, on the other, the fictional urban sites depicted in this novel still bear the wounds of war, oppression and murder. Discovered through a complex process of archeological reconstruction and identification, these public places help reconstruct a harrowing personal story of self-loss and self-discovery.
Jacques Austerlitz is now a professor of architecture, a British citizen plagued - at the end of his career - by the crisis of non-identity. His travels take him around Europe for assiduous research and careful observation of historical ruins and architectural wonders, while he himself is haunted by the eerie feeling of something essential missing from his life. It is when he decides to retrace the train trip back to his native Czech Republic from London (via Germany) that early childhood memories - thought dead - start coming back to him. The map of his estrangement as a child refugee during WWII is now reconstructed step by step, with a double climax in Prague and Paris, two urban spaces still imbued with trauma, where he tracks down elements of his parents’ own story of deportation and death at the Nazis’ hand.
This paper proposes, therefore, to explore the archeology of trauma as a sum of fragmented stories preserved and transmitted by architectural relics as a reassembled whole, one that carries, compliments and sometimes replaces human memory. Although materially tangible and more reliable than the often elusive human memory, these soulless sites of trauma fail nevertheless to provide that soothing, reassuring element so necessary to closure and human healing.

2012, Botez, Catalina

In this paper the author draws on Primo Levi's problematic use of biographic narrative techniques by means of a systematic and symbolic co-ordination of a selection of 21 inorganic elements pertaining to Mendeleyev's periodic table. By exploring the mechanisms of remembrance and trauma in conjunction with chemistry and the necessities of testimony, the author argues that Primo Levi's collection of vignettes both reaffirms and challenges modern conceptions of autobiography. The author applies the Greek concept of techné to notions of biographic authorship, and shows how work as narrative/linguistic skill, on the one hand, and laboratory work as scientific engagement with material elements, on the other, are combined in the figure of the Holocaust survivor cum writer-scientist in order to negotiate and restore human integrity. The author sustains that Levi's decade-long attempts to alleviate personal trauma are conditioned by this reinstatement of human dignity through science and intellect; essentially, Levi strives to rehabilitate the concept of life itself, so damaged by the event of the Holocaust and equally central to (auto)biographic literature and the domain of chemistry.

2010, Botez, Catalina

The dynamics of silence and silencing in Australian writer Lily Brett’s autobiographic fiction Things Could Be Worse reflects the crisis of memory and understanding experienced by both first and second-generation Holocaust survivors within the diasporic space of contemporary Australia. It leads to issues of handling traumatic and transgenerational memory, the latter also known as postmemory (M. Hirsch), in the long aftermath of atrocities, and problematises the role of forgetting in shielding displaced identities against total dissolution of the self.

This paper explores the mechanisms of remembrance and forgetting in L. Brett’s narrative by mainly focusing on two female characters, mother and daughter, whose coming to terms with (the necessary) silence, on the one hand, and articulated memories, on the other, reflects different modes of comprehending and eventually coping with individual trauma.

By differentiating between several types of silence encountered in Brett’s prose (that of the voiceless victims, of survivors and their offspring, respectively) I argue that silence can equally voice and hush traumatic experience, that it is never empty, but invested with individual and collective meaning.

Essentially, I contend that beside the (self)damaging effects of silence, there are also beneficial consequences of silence, in that it plays a crucial role in emplacing the displaced, rebuilding their shattered self, and contributing to their their reintegration, survival and even partial healing.