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  • Turning Back:Retracing Twentieth-Century Trauma in Virginia Woolf, Martin Amis, and W. G. Sebald
  • Natania Rosenfeld

Haunted Reading

The literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries responded to its contemporary upheavals; so does that of the late twentieth century. If we perceive the later upheavals as less psychologically, morally, and artistically digestible, and read backward to an era that now seems comparatively innocent, do we blame that era for failing to deploy literary strategies that might have anticipated and forestalled coming catastrophes? By a more vigorous experimentalism, a more insistent disordering, might early-twentieth century artists and intellectuals have helped avert the monstrous rage for order that would result in the murder of millions?

Reading backward is always problematic. After 1918, there was no predicting that a world now divided between Before and After the Great War could come to be divided into Before and After the Atomic Bomb, Before and After death camps. The horrors of World War I were previously unimaginable (and, as Paul Fussell has shown, initially and for some time indescribable); but even after the world had lost that innocence, it still could not foresee the explosions or ovens of mid-century. Eventually literature would have to adapt itself to human acts that the worst horror fictions of Revelations or Dante never imagined. As Omer Bartov writes in Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation,

the major difference between a subterranean Hell and these earthly environs is that while the former is, by definition, either a product of the imagination or the creation of superhuman forces, the [End Page 109] latter are man-made, and defy any attempt at fictionalization. Neither before, nor during, nor indeed after the event, has any fictive imagination been able to fully capture the reality of the Western Front or of Auschwitz. . . . And yet that unimaginable reality was itself to a large extent the product of human imagination, even if the ultimate outcome greatly surpassed it, metamorphosing itself in a wholly new and indescribable entity.

(1996: 33)

In both instances, that of the Western Front and that of Auschwitz, the imagination is afflicted by an inability to reconcile the apparently seamless continuation of "normal" life with an unprecedented breach in history. The result was a new topos, that of "turning back," whether expressed in the wishful desire to "turn back the clock," or in the decision not to forge ahead, or in the determination to rescue someone or something left behind. In the texts that I discuss here, the topos has positive and negative resonances; it can connote a nostos, a return to a world of peace, but also an inversion that denotes unending trauma.

This article examines three novels whose narrative movement compels the reader to turn back and revisit beginnings, including previous readings, while raising questions about the author's capacity to set straight a traumatic history. Among these questions is whether a cancellation or erasure of dreadful events is in the power of an author, so that at least the unsettled fictional world can be righted.

The formal feature that accompanies the turning-back topos is doubling or tripartite structures, as in Lily Briscoe's painting with its "line in the middle" in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Doubling is the shaping trope of Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, where time is driven back on itself as in a rewinding film and the narrator is the protagonist's dubious alter ego. In W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants, the structure is ultimately disconsoling, as its four sections lack symmetry and the tales of psychic and physical suffering, reverberating among them, remain unresolved. The reader herself is forced to turn back and reread, searching vainly for an end to trauma.

The topos of "turning back" is also associated with several recurring motifs. One is that of the fragmentary object, a metonymy for recoverable wholes or, in the case of post-Holocaust writing, irrevocable lives—what Michael Rothberg has termed the "traumatic index" (2000: 104). Another is that of the ghost or double—the unburied past which returns, either in the form of a remembered person or as an undercurrent [End Page...

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