Writing as Resilience: Holocaust Trauma in Select Novels of Elie Wiesel

Abstract

“Most Consciences are satisfied quickly enough, and need only a few words in order to reach a definitive opinion of the unknowable” (111, Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics). Most trauma writings are considered as spring boards for furthering academic mileage or presenting a paper to inflate the curriculum vitae or credentials that fetch some perks. As a student of literature I always had a skeptical take on the confessional poetry of Kamala Dass which was otherwise categorized as erotic, revealing kind of writing and mostly not regarded as something important. But after reading novels on Armenian genocide, holocaust and world war , it became evident that people write about their trauma:  collective, personal or social  in order to inform, support  and to convey a stronger message that writing is a way of displaying their solidarity  and courage. To put in in William Faulkner’s terms, these writers prefer writing as resilience to reiterate that the past is not dead, infact it is not even past. Only a few care to read between the lines and it is important to learn why people write on trauma: personal, collective or generational which technically lie outside the boundaries of experience, unfathomable but welling up waves of perennial pain and horror that need to be vented but no specific ways or means can ever drain it out. By the time one finishes to understand the definition of trauma painted by the linguistic or symbolic yardsticks, it feels like mind draining activity. This paper tries to unravel the rationale of writing trauma and the reverberations of trauma through the select works of Elie Wiesel.