|
|
war. Paradoxically, however, neither of the two novels discussed in the last chapter, Günter Grass’s Tin Drum (1959) and Tim O’Brien’s Going after Cacciato (1978), can be said to be about war, but rather about an “unusual” state of mind induced by the war chronotope (perceived as “usual” by everyone affected, however). If Carpentier, Rhys, and Condé represented the shock chronotope of slavery in an apparent attempt to deal with vicarious traumatization caused by reading texts of historical violence (according to their own admissions); if García Márquez and Rushdie re-created the chronotope of colonialism and early postcolonialism after either witnessing political violence (García Márquez) or discovering the tumultuous past of a culture of origin (Rushdie); and if Malamud and Skibell fictionalized the chronotope of the Holocaust in order to bear witness to transgenerational trauma, Grass and O’Brien write the chronotope of war as an act of both re-covering and working through personal traumata, and of coping with simmering, but acutely painful, feelings of guilt. Surprisingly, critics such as Michelle Balaev have expressed their doubts about the theory of intergenerational trauma, which “limits the meaning of trauma in literature because it conflates the distinctions between personal loss actually experienced by an individual and a historical absence found in one’s ancestral lineage” (151). What Balaev and others seem to be missing is, first, the way screen memories work in covering up historical trauma; second, the legitimacy of bearing witness by proxy; and third, the synecdochic and metonymic character of literature, that is, its capability of creating universal meanings through limited plots and individual characters.
The sheer fact that Grass and O’Brien have artistically re-created a shock chronotope based on personal experiences does not in the least make their narratives any more believable than the other novels that I discuss, written by non-participants in, or secondary witnesses of, a shock chronotope. While I duly acknowledge the importance of the biographical elements embedded or suggested in The Tin Drum and in Going after Cacciato, my point is that the apparent fictional-memoir forms, in spite of their implied tone of authenticity, do not necessarily invest the accounts with any more historical/documentary authority than purely