Of Sons and (M)others: The Spectropoetics of Exile in Autobiographical Writing by Amos Oz and Albert Cohen

Both Albert Cohen and Amos Oz have produced lyrical, beloved autobiographical writing about their mothers, Cohen in Le Livre de ma mère (1954) and Oz in Sipur al ahava ve-ÿoshekh (2002). Crossing the line in these texts from passive memory into active evocation, each author invites, interacts with, and dismisses his mother's specter. He finds himself struggling to negotiate the terms and history of his own identity as a Franco-Swiss or Israeli author, respectively, through the maternal narrative of exile and alienation that emerges in her haunting. In both texts, the son's engagement with the specter reveals a central tension, simultaneously staging and interrupting his sense of belonging. This essay considers these autobiographical texts through the lens of Jacques Derrida's "spectropoetics" to argue that the maternal ghost dictates her son's narrative, complicating his relation to home and the dynamics of personal and political identity. Conceptualizing the son's understanding of the mother's past milieu in terms of carnival on the one hand and melancholia on the other, I examine the mother's alterity in her adopted homeland. The son's interpretation and representation of his mother's place, spurred by her ghostly presence in his text, motivates my theorization of haunting as displacement and leads to an articulation of the bond between autobiography and spectral inheritance.