In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Other People’s Pain: Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics
  • Karen Scherzinger
Martin Modlinger and Philipp Sonntag, eds., Other People’s Pain: Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics, vol. 18 of Cultural History and Literary Imagination, ed. Christian J. Emden and David Midgely (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011). Paper, 244 pp. ISBN 978–3–0343–0260–9.

In 2010 Yann Martel published his long-awaited third novel, Beatrice and Virgil, a tale about a stuffed donkey (Beatrice) and a stuffed howler monkey (Virgil), an ex-Nazi taxidermist, and a prize-winning writer (Henry) who suffers writer’s block.1 The main reason for Henry’s (read: Martel’s) writer’s block is the fact that he is trying to write a novel about a stuffed donkey and a stuffed howler monkey, an ex-Nazi taxidermist, and a prizewinning writer who suffers writer’s block. The metafictional circularities are enough to make any writer’s head spin, but his problems do not stop there. His main difficulty is that his novel is based upon an allegory in which animals represent the Jews exterminated in the Holocaust.

Perhaps predictably, the publication of the novel met with outrage in some prominent quarters. Michiko Kakutani, in the New York Times, called it “misconceived and offensive . . . a botched and at times cringe-making fable,” a “far cry” from Art Spiegelman’s Maus (in which human characters are also represented as animals).2 James Lasdun argued in the Guardian that “far from using animals to think about Jews, the taxidermist is more interested in using Jews to think about animals . . . [it is] strangely trivial and narcissistic: a book that ends up thinking about neither Jews nor animals, but using the extermination of both to think about, of all [End Page 119] things, writer’s block.”3 In a similar vein the anonymous reviewer in the New Yorker described the whole project as simply “tone deaf.”4

What these (and other) readers have in common is a strong distaste for Martel’s novel as well as some inarticulacy when it comes to expressing the logic of their objections. In what sense is Martel’s allegory “tone deaf”? At what point does the allegorical device (“using animals to think about Jews”) tip over into its unacceptable reverse (“using Jews to think about animals”)? How does Martel’s writer’s block become a “narcissistic” offense? What distinguishes Maus from Beatrice and Virgil?

The collection of essays edited by Martin Modlinger and Philipp Sonntag, Other People’s Pain, does not address the uproar that greeted the publication of Beatrice and Virgil directly; however, the collection goes some way toward delineating the ethical terrain upon which such responses—and the dilemmas they index—might find a philosophical foothold.

The essays mark a welcome advance in trauma studies in that they are not arrested by the stalemate of the representational paradox: “the impossibility of fully grasping the traumatic moment and of translating it into language (especially in regard to the Holocaust), and the necessity to transmit knowledge of these traumas and to translate them for new audiences” (4); what Roger Luckhurst calls the “narrative/anti-narrative tension at the core of trauma” (4). While not dismissive of this contradiction, the essay authors seek ways in which the ethics of representing trauma might be understood. As the editors of the collection remark in their introduction, the status of and assumptions attached to the “we” of trauma (victim, witness, spectator, writer, reader, scholar) need to be interrogated and have their gradations defined. The aestheticization of trauma is a central concern: “Art, in particular postmodern art, can navigate brilliantly the territories of trauma, but it should be careful not to succumb to voyeuristic and arrogant spectatorship” (9). The questions that mark the Beatrice and Virgil furor resonate: when does witnessing become voyeuristic? When does compassionate interest and the need to commemorate become “arrogant spectatorship”? What does this mean for trauma scholarship?

The ethics of reflecting trauma must perforce engage with the justifiably renowned work of Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Doris Laub, and the best essays in this collection do so in ways that illuminate how [End Page 120] the...

pdf