Erotikk og reise i traumatisk erindring. Madame Nielsens Det højeste væsen mellom myte og politikk

In the Danish author-performer Claus Beck-Nielsen’s multi-artistic work the notion of the journey can be understood not only as a political and activist initiative, but also a configuration of movements that takes part in a continuous examination of identities and positions. His 2017 novel [The Highest Being], published under the name Madame Nielsen, demonstrates how his energetic activity and flamboyant performativity also imply an aesthetic confrontation with a traumatic past. The two plots — the failed love story and the falling dictator — reflect each other in their recycling of myths and clichés. By means of the concept of ‘postmemory’, I argue that the novel makes use of cultural conventions achieving neither an historically adequate representation nor a reparative one. The novel reveals the ways in which trauma works as an impossibility of experiencing and therefore also a distortion of memorizing processes. Both in the form of the historic events connected to the Romanian dictator and the narrator’s affair with the Romanian ballerina, powerful mediations end up substituting the experience and instead consolidating its traumatic memory.