W pułapce wizerunków [przeł. Roma Sendyka]

Reconstruction of the camp experience in Holocaust literature extends to the experience of the senses. Ernst van Alphen draws our attention to visualisation techniques applied by Tadeusz Borowski and the French survivor Charlotte Delbo in their Auschwitz-related short stories. Subject to observation is the action of the speaking ‘I’ being confronted with ‘the unseeable’. Van Alphen’s diagnosis has it that the witness turns into a passive piece of machinery recording ‘visual imprints’ – reflections of events occurring in his memory which becomes a sort of ‘glass film’. These afterimages – or, ‘re-memories’ – reappear in acts of ‘traumatic re-enactment’, making the existence after the camp’s liberation subject to a specific type of memory. It is a ‘deep’ memory that levels temporal distance to the remembered events, remaining beyond the control of the remembering ‘I’. For this reason, accounts of survivors so frequently instantaneously decline into present-tense structures. Therefore, the watching figures – those of the witnesses – get starting incarnated into the figures being observed; hence, no narrative distance is possible, whereas the text becomes a performance: the past trauma experienced anew.