La narrazione del trauma nei romanzi controfattuali sull'Olocasuto

In force of their typical social and political dimension (La Capra 2004: 123), trauma studies have a peculiar focus on Holocaust as a central point of crisis in the twentieth century history, culture and narrative (Kurtz 2018:78). The problematic representation of a paradigmatic traumatic event such as the Holocaust – argued as the crises of witnessing Agamben (1998) Felman and Loud (1992) point to, either as impossible narration of cultural memory (Caruth) or even earlier in Adorno’s injunction writing poetry after Auschwitz – and the involved questions about the truth of a ‘mediatized’ historical experience or the distinction between historical and structural trauma (La Capra 2001: 82) could impinge interestingly on theorizing counterfactual novels. To this extent the impossibility of acknowledge trauma in Caruth’s (1996, 2013) psychological and deconstructive (poststructuralist) approach, the loss of referentiality and the claimed unspeakable truth of trauma together with the compulsive repetition of the traumatic past as literary issue could intertwine key aspects of alternative history novels beginning with its proper counterfactual dimension and divergence which foreshadows a sort of ‘empathic unsettlement’ (La Capra 2001). I would examine such relationship between trauma theory and the subversion proper to counterfactual narrative specifically dealing with Holocaust and II World War (Harris’ Fatherland, Roth’s The Plot Against America, Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union). In respect of the notions of ‘traumatic realism’ (Rothbeg 2000) and intergenerational trauma, I would attempt to considering the counterfactual Holocaust novels as a distinctive literary way working through the wounds of history and conceptualizing whatever political, cultural and ethical that made it happened.