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Arnold Paper Transgenerational
Arnold Paper Transgenerational
Arnold Paper Transgenerational
Her work on Holocaust survivors reveals that photography oftentimes serves to commemorate
traumatizing events and, as such, constitute a chief linker by which, in the midst of family
members, these memories are kept alive and passed on. What the work on secondary or
vicarious traumatisation has brought forth is that distant offspring may be vulnerable to the
effects that traumas have caused in the first place and generate, in their own right, symptoms
that are either directly or associatively connected with these events. If the assumption proves
correct that traumatic events can resurface again, thereby curbing the chronology of events in
drastic ways, as Schutzenberger's research has shown, the notion of what an human being is,
and what allows for the creation of self must be subjected to substantial revisionism.
Eva Hoffmann‟s autobiography Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language is a
wonderful literary and historical document, which recounts, from the perspective of the
narrator, the story of her family over some decades. In 1958 they emigrate from Cracow to
Vancouver where they start a new life. Like Richard Rodriguez, for example, who, as the son
of Mexican immigrants to the United States, learns a new language and excels at school, or
Nathalie Sarraute, who leaves Russia with her father and appropriates French as her new
language, Hoffman, too, gradually works her way up the academic ladder, attending the best
colleges in the country, before she receives her doctorate in English. The rest of the narrative
is a kind of “Bildungsroman” taking the reader, chronologically, to different places and
offering insights into the personal world of the narrator: her first love affair, her talent for
music, her work in New York. That's all there is to it, it seems, if there were not this latent
feeling of unease flaring up, a kind of undercurrent of meaning, as if some events had not
been fully disclosed.
In fact, it is not the explicitly narrated events which make this autobiography so
appealing. Rather, from the perspective of transgenerational studies, the reader gets
acquainted with some narrative episodes, en passant, which precede the text and thus lie
outside the boundaries within which the narrative is cast, that are of particular interest.
Precisely because the silence that enshrouds these episodes creates in its absence of explicit
information a vital source for creative reshaping in the form of rewriting, rethinking, and
reacting that this narrative has much appeal. Hoffman explains,
[S]ometimes, I think of him and Zofia and myself, and others likes us
I know as part of the same story—the story of children who came from
the war, and who couldn‟t make sufficient sense of several worlds they
grew up in, and didn‟t know by what lights to act. I think, sometimes, we
were children too overshadowed by our parents‟ stories, and without
enough sympathy for ourselves, for the serious dilemmas of our own lives,
and how thereby couldn‟t live up to our parents‟ desire—amazing in its
strength—to create new life and to bestow on us a new world. (230)
In this passage Hoffman describes the impact of war on herself, her relatives and
friends with much poise, sensing, however, that something had gone amiss in her world,
anticipating what she later interprets as “a world that returns all my sense of loss like a sudden
punch in the stomach” (92). What emerges from these lines is a profound sense of alienation
and dislocation from one world to another —affective, bodily and psychic—where words go
beyond the descriptive power they hold. In fact, the reader never finds out what the parents
have experienced, but can only conjecture by the enumeration of fragmentary episodes what
the past might have looked like when they escaped to Ukraine to hide out. It is precisely this
openness of narratable logic that imposes a profound incertitude about what had actually
happened before the narrative sets in. Not being able to „make sufficient sense of the world“is
a key statement in the narrative because it recaptures the conditions under which Hoffman
grew up; a condition which can be best characterized as absence of explicit meaning in the
aftermath of trauma.
Citing Nicolas Abraham, Schutzenberger recounts the story of a man who knew
nothing about his grandfather. In his pastime he loved chasing butterflies and collecting
stones. As a geologist, this leisurely activity was nothing out of the ordinary. This man sought
professional help. Abraham suggested exploring the family history and identifying hidden
links by going back several generations. The patient then found out that he had a
grandfather—his mother‟s father—whom nobody had ever mentioned. After seeing the
grandfather‟s family, he learned that this grandfather had purportedly done shameful things
(bank robbery) and was sentenced to forced labor, to “break rocks” (casser les cailloux); a
term for forced labor in French. The grandfather was then executed in the gas chamber. The
non-figurable fate of the grandfather comes into view at the moment it transposes the very
dislocation it has brought forth into the life of a distant offspring. Schutzenberger, quoting
Abraham, writes, “What does our man do on weekends? A lover of geology, he „breaks
rocks,‟ and catches butterflies and proceeds to kill them in a can of cyanide” (47). Precisely
because the traumatic disappearance of the grandfather has been left unprocessed, hushed up,
as it were, it resurfaces in modes that are not causally, but associatively, bound to the initial
event, whereby it transposes itself into the present in modes not immediately recognizable.
Who would believe that the geologist‟s pastime and his grandfather‟s death would be
associated with each other?
The non-figurable fate of Hoffman‟s father, who experienced massive dislocation and
the danger of extermination, comes into view precisely because the narrative goes beyond
what is explicitly narrated and creates an organizing principle that lies outside its textual
confines. The power of this organizing principle can be gleaned from the following example.
Hoffman writes, “Everyone—this is common wisdom—is involved in an illicit activity of
some kind” (15). What kind of illicit activity it was remains an open question, and whether
this illicit activity is associated with survival strategies is not answered either. Howe ever, if
this illicit activity served to ward off personal danger in the face of terror because it allowed
her father to survive, then, this seemingly insignificant phrase draws on a subtext the content
of which is too traumatic to be broached. Hoffman brings the non-figurable into view by
recreating a glaring absence of explicitness in an elegantly crafted narrative and making it part
of its very structure. “I come from the war. It is my true origin. But as with all our origins, I
cannot grasp it. Perhaps we never know where we come from; in a way we are all created ex
nihilo” (23), she adds, yet this origin lies beyond what she knows or has experienced herself.
The absence of explicitness is also what causes the transmission of transgenerational
haunting to operate in the first place. Serge Tisseron argues that children who are exposed to
traumatic events through indirect or secondary exposure relate to what he calls “une vacuole”
(a psychic inclusion) of “anxiety-provoking and incomplete fragments” (127). The parent
becomes the mediating link through which the traumatic experience is kept alive or
reactivated. Tisseron suggests that the presence of anxiety-provoking fragments makes it
impossible for the child to fully symbolize what has factually happened. The parents most
often refuse to talk about a traumatic event, yet, as studies about family secrets have shown
(Bradshaw), these events do not lose potency even if or just because they are silenced and
hushed up. While an earlier generation fails to assimilate the trauma, the next generation will
take up on it and try to assimilate it by generating fantasy scenarios of what might have
happened earlier. Hoffman writes, “And as I listen, I lower my head in acknowledgement that
this—the pain of this—is where I come from, and that‟s useless to get away” (25). The silence
which is cast over the war is significant precisely because it is potent enough to create room
for the emergence of scenarios that fit what the protagonist has heard or assumed to be true.
It would be erroneous to assume that Eva Hoffmann‟s narrative details the
transmission of traumatic happenings over several generations. She only provides allusions to
horrific events, as mentioned earlier, that remain outside the textual boundaries. The
organizing principle outside these confines comes close to transgenerational haunting. When
Hoffman is born the idea of inheriting something which she has not experienced first hand
comes about when her parents give her a name, Ewa Alfreda, which is clearly indebted to and
marked by people of an earlier generation. She is named after her grandmothers, of whom,
Hoffman says, “I have only the dimmest memories” (16), but, who, most likely, died in the
concentration camps. The daughter thus starts life by inheriting a legacy which is too
burdensome to carry and too difficult to integrate in life. Her activate a wishful thinking so as
to commemorate the loss of close and dear family members.
Hoffman perpetuates the legacy of significant relatives of an earlier generation to
whom she is bound by her first name. Christian Flavigny ascribes the choice of first names
particular power. Through the “identifying referent” (“référent identitaire”) the child is
irrevocably marked with a reference, “phantasmal and/or mythic” (120), to something that has
occurred in the past. The name given to a child represents the name previously given to other
family members and contains in it the echoes of a stranger. This stranger remains connected
with a distant offspring through the first name they share. The name thus “functions like a
seal” (121), Flavigny asserts. Although the reader does not find out precisely what happened
to these women, it can be gleaned from the author‟s own remark (“my parents honored the
dead”) that they must have died during or shortly after the war.
To make matters more complicated, Hoffman adds that her father out of an “excess of
happiness” mistakes herself, the first born, for a son. The question arises who is who, and
what do the ones who are named actually represent? Would it be fair to speculate, along the
same theoretical lines, that through wishful thinking on her father‟s behalf the daughter
represents another family member—a brother, a father, or an uncle?—whose absence and loss
have furrowed the psyche of the survivors so as to commemorate them at unexpected
moments? Again the text remains silent. What the reader is left with is a feeling of unease and
disquiet because the text in its richly layered fabrics of allusions clearly moves beyond that
which is explicitly narrated. What other family members died, and how they died can only be
reconfigured speculatively by means of allusions, first names, and historical events. It seems
highly probable; however, that the father had lost close family members whose absence
fundamentally altered the fabrics of his family history.
Although her stay in Canada and success in the United States as a scholar are highly
fascinating, paralleling narratives, such as Agate Nesaule‟s A Woman in Amber: Healing the
Trauma of War and Exile or Loung Ung‟s First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of
Cambodia Remembers, making apparent that Hoffman has found a new identity, it is the
sparsely articulated war stories, the events that preceded the narrative, which gives it a
richness that comes from afar, sustained by the dead to which this autobiography is dedicated.
The lack of explicit information constitutes this undercurrent of meaning which subtends the
narrative, imposing through its subsidiary structure a kind of reading that makes an opening
into the outside from which place the narrative is secretly organized. This kind of subsidiary
structure has a framing function and parallels, in many regards, the transmission of
transgenerational mandates that may surface to haunt the living. Hoffman wonders, “How will
I ever pin down the reality of what happened to my parents” (23), the forces of which are
beyond her control.
Works Cited