Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children’s Literature

6. T Is for Trauma: The Children’s Literature of Atrocity

181 S ince the late 1980s and early 1990s, children’s texts about trauma, and especially the traumas of the Holocaust, have proliferated. Despite the difficulties of representing the Holocaust, or perhaps because of them, there seems to be consensus now that children’s literature is the most rather than the least appropriate forum for trauma work. Thus in “A New Algorithm in Evil: Children’s Literature in a Post-Holocaust World,” Elizabeth R. Baer emphasizes the urgency of “a children’s literature of atrocity,” recommending “confrontational ” texts and proposing “a set of [four] criteria by which to measure the usefulness and effectiveness of children’s texts in confronting the Holocaust sufficiently” (2000, 384). A is now for Auschwitz, and H for Holocaust (and sometimes Hiroshima).1 Baer sees as exemplary the picturebook Rose Blanche (1985), written by Roberto Innocenti and Christophe Gallaz and illustrated by Innocenti, along with Seymour Rossel’s nonfiction history The Holocaust (1992) and Jane Yolen’s novel The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988). Such books emphasize their protagonists ’ direct experiences of the Holocaust, experiences that extend to and presumably interpellate the child reader. Like the unconscious as theorized by Sigmund Freud, the Holocaust is at once historical event and never-ending story, the primal scene 6. T Is for Trauma The Children’s Literature of Atrocity 182 T is for trauma endlessly reconstructed. It must be spoken about but remains inaccessible : this is the necessary paradox of Holocaust writing. Contrary to Theodor Adorno, the sentiment now goes, we must write poetry after Auschwitz, must attempt to reckon with the Holocaust despite the dif- ficulty and potential futility of our efforts.2 Even so, the Holocaust has only recently become an acceptable narrative project. As Susan Gubar emphasizes in Poetry after Auschwitz, silence about the Holocaust, alongside outright denial, held sway through the late 1950s, at which point writers, artists, and critics began finally to engage the Holocaust and its consequences (2003, 3).3 Lawrence L. Langer’s foundational study The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, published in 1975, is one of the earliest long treatments of what he calls the “literature of atrocity.” In the United States, the first wave of Holocaust studies coincided with and was in part authorized by the women’s and antiwar movements, which established psychological trauma as a pressing sociopolitical problem.4 The idea of trauma has since gone mainstream, maintaining its medical and psychological meanings while also becoming the stuff of literature and of critical theory. Trauma, writes Kirby Farrell, has become “both a clinical syndrome and a trope” (1998, 2). Trauma writing is an amalgam of literary and psychological discourse, one in which certain kinds of trauma take priority. We could claim a longer history for children’s literature about trauma, one less clearly organized around the Holocaust and less exemplary by Baer’s standards. Much depends on how trauma or traumatic experience is constructed and accentuated. There are many children’s books about death, for instance, but not all portray death as a destabilizing event. Books for children and adolescents about war date back at least to the nineteenth century, but most do not emphasize the psychological toll of war, death, or genocide.5 Much “realistic” literature for children and adolescents deals with traumatic experiences—divorce, racism, class struggle, and so forth—even when that literature is not tagged as “trauma” writing per se. What is new is the atrocity part, as well as the emphasis on experiences of pain and suffering on the part of principal characters. Older children’s literature tends to be about the management of trauma, whereas the children’s literature of atrocity makes clear the profound emotional and psychological effects of trauma— even the impossibility of recovery. T is for trauma 183 A proper history of the children’s literature of atrocity would require a thorough psychosocial history of American childhood. Jane Thrailkill (2003) gestures toward such a history, locating her critique of recent trauma theory in the larger context of American literary sentimentalism , showing how the realist tradition that Mark Twain introduced against “feminine” sentimentality has nonetheless made way for the reincarnation of the wounded or dead child in that most unlikely of places, critical theory. As Thrailkill has it, the suffering literary child made thinkable the wounded child of social reform and psychological or social discourse around the turn of the century and now survives as...