Passage (Question 1-6)

As a genre that has always been focused as much on narrative process as on narrative content—on how to write about its subject matter as much as on the subject matter itself—Holocaust literature has from the outset made widespread use of intertextuality. This becomes more prevalent still in writing by post-Holocaust authors for whom the Holocaust past, though not part of their own life-story, has come to feel like the story of their life.

In her renowned monograph Holocaust Fiction, Angela Kershaw observes, “If there is one method that stands out among all the others used in Holocaust fiction, it is intertextuality.” More recently, Kershaw has expanded upon her monograph writing, “Although such works are not themselves testimonial, being the products of creative writers of the second or third generation, they frequently rely on overt intertextual references to a canon of Holocaust writing that is directly testimonial.”

Kershaw is referring to post-Holocaust texts where the primary purpose of intertextuality seems to be that of filling in blanks. The recourse to a pre-text apparently serves to compensate for an absence or lack of direct experience or first-hand knowledge, of documentary authenticity or testimonial authority, of words capable of giving shape to the inconceivable. As such, it appears linked to an encumbering awareness of the (perceived) limitations, inadequacy or impropriety of the imaginative act.

In this use, or reading, of post-Holocaust intertextuality, authors resort to it to supplement the content of their narrative while also bolstering the legitimacy of their undertaking. It is a practice that marks a text’s distance to events at the same time as its deference to a higher and prior textual authority, even if that deference is ultimately (also) intended to be self-legitimizing.

Yet the post-Holocaust author’s intertextual engagement with the Holocaust generation is not always undertaken with the primary aim of procuring testimony, and the Holocaust-generation source texts are often more literary than narrowly documentary. Such engagement has often subsequently struggled with an ‘anxiety of originality’ identified by Kershaw that is difficult to escape in the use of non-fiction sources.

Manifesting as a near obligatory intertextual return to Holocaust-generation authors, such intertextuality features as part of a set of “symptoms of incomplete mourning,” to borrow terminology from Miller Budick, symptoms that may make post-Holocaust texts appear “melancholic rather than mournful,” and “fixated, or otherwise obsessed with the Holocaust rather than engaged in meaningful discourse with it.” Though they may ultimately “point the way to a form of mourning that enables the reader as well as the writer of the text to put the past to rest,” the intertextual engagement of such textual exercises in the failure to fully mourn with their predecessors.

The uneasy blend of exhuming and mining, erasure and creation, inspiration and imitation that transpires as a result of post-Holocaust intertextuality, a purported transgenerational joint venture, reflects some of the challenges of influence faced by post-Holocaust Jewish writers who feel that ‘their’ story derives its meaning from someone else’s. However, whether we think of ‘exhumation’ as a form of resurrecting, contributing to, displacing someone else’s narrative, or a combination of all three, what it seems designed to achieve above all is the breaking down of the impression that the relationship between first-generation and post-Holocaust narrative is a linear, uni-directional one.

.

Find an error? Take a screenshot, email it to us at error@mytestingsolution.com, and we’ll send you $3!