Kaddish for those we never knew: mourning and bearing witness to losses that are not our own through fiction

While fiction and testimony may seem to be genres at odds with one another, fictional literature has been at the forefront of advances in memory and trauma studies. Theories such as Marianne Hirsch's postmemory and the so-called 'transnational turn' in memory studies have aided in describing how later generations deal with inherited memories of past traumas and those from other contexts through literature. Nevertheless, as history surges on, we find ourselves ever more distanced from the violence of the twentieth century century, whose losses, both material and abstract, are now inherited by the present postmemory generation and can only be assumed vicariously. These conditions, coupled with the effects of an ever-globalizing world, result not so much in a deficit of factual memory but a deficit of ethico-political or emotional positions from which to confront the violent past and its losses. Within memory and trauma studies much has been written on literary or cultural representations and the work of mourning. The original Freudian concept of mourning as it is positioned opposite melancholia has often been critiqued and written off as conservative, exclusionary, conducive to amnesia, and so on. These concerns are particularly relevant in the case of postmemory, posttraumatic narratives where the losses of previous generations to be worked through in a potential, collective mourning process are temporally distanced from the present. Nevertheless, I propose a view of mourning through these types of works that moves beyond the original Freudian consolatory paradigm: that is, a literature that seeks to offer neither a substitute nor consolation nor promises of overcoming a loss. Instead, I envision a process of mourning that transcends this temporal distance through the sustaining of loss, the incorporation of absence within the narrative form and on the level of the diegesis, where the irrecoverability of the past becomes evident through the necessary recourse to invention, supposition and fiction itself. This same acknowledgement of past losses as irrecoverable and the notion of our position in the present as inconsolable before loss can also serve as an affective model for mourning that transcends not only time but geographical or even cultural distance. In other words, the recognition of the irreparability of loss through the fictional work can serve as a means of reframing claims of injustice transnationally. I see these narratives as constituting a sort of testimony that allows us not only to heed the imperative to remember but also permits us to participate in a collective mourning process that transcends not only temporal distance but cultural and geographic as well. As an example of a transnational posttraumatic narrative of mourning, I will briefly reference the North American Jewish author Nathan Englander and his novel The Ministry of Special Cases (2007), a novel about Argentina's detained-disappeared that presents itself as incapable of offering consolation while, at the same time, offering itself as a testimony of how, despite distances, we are affected and touched by suffering across borders.