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ABSTARCT
D. M. Thomas’ The White Hotel negotiates an uneasy point of intersection between our theories of psychic injury and our assessments of atrocity by attempting to depict two positions that appear to exist in tension with each other: (1) an insistence that Holocaust that is historically and morally incommensurate with other catastrophes and (2) a belief that the post-traumatic maladies suffered by survivors of the Final Solution might be susceptible to a comprehensive healing. Thomas’ allegorical (and critically polarizing) coda becomes the vehicle through which he orchestrates a reconcilement these two commitments.
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Notes on contributor
Cates Baldridge is the Battell-Stewart Professor of English and American Literatures at Middlebury College. He has written books on Graham Greene, the theory of the novel, and the Portuguese encounter with Ethiopia, as well as journal articles on various 19th and 20th-century figures.
Notes
1 This helpful term is employed by Sauerberg, “When the Soul Takes Wing,” 7.
2 See especially Robertson, “Hystery, Herstory, History,” but also Vieira, “No Place for Utopia” and Sauerberg, “When the Soul Takes Wing,” 6.
3 Thomas, The White Hotel. Page numbers henceforth cited within parentheses.
4 Eaglestone, Holocaust and the Postmodern, 33.
5 People of keen intelligence and obvious good will can be found on both sides of the question of the Holocaust’s moral uniqueness. Those who deny its incommensurable character include White, Figural Realism, 69–70, who calls the Shoah ‘paradigmatic’ of other genocides in modernity and coins the adjective ‘Holocaustal’ to describe other dire modern events. As someone who takes the opposite view, White himself (Figural Realism, 79) cites a passage from Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History, 279: ‘despite all necessary attempts to comprehend it, the Nazi system in the end exceeds all comprehension. One cannot comprehend but only confront and object.’
6 Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 8. Here and in the pages following, Caruth explains the difficulties – and perhaps the unfruitfulness – of differentiating, within a psychoanalytic framework, between traumas that originate ‘inside’ the psyche and those that originate ‘outside’ it, but in Lisa’s case the distinction seems clarifying.
7 The classic critique of Freud’s neglect of historical forces is mounted by Herbert Marcuse and his followers. See Marcuse, Eros and Civilization and Brown, Life Against Death.
8 Robertson, “Hystery, Herstory, History,” 457.
9 Several such accounts of dissociative states suffered by victims newly deposited at concentration camps are compiled and compared by Des Pres, The Survivor, 81–5. For a more theoretical treatment, see Granofsky, The Trauma Novel, 8–9, where he makes a helpful distinction between assimilation of, and accommodation to, conditions that are utterly alien to one’s previous experience.
10 Hartman, “Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies,” 537.
11 Thomas, Memories and Hallucinations, 48–9.
12 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 62.
13 Laub, “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes,” 69.
14 Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, 64. He quotes Lifton, Home from the War, 314.
15 Eisenstein, Traumatic Encounters, 100.
16 Thomas, Memories and Hallucinations, 40.
17 Eaglestone, Holocaust and the Postmodern, 32.
18 Vieira, “No Place for Utopia,” 123.
19 Barnsley, “The White Hotel,” 459.
20 Baldridge, “The White Hotel’s Scandalous Finale.”
21 The one tortured exception is Seigelman who, in “The White Hotel: Visions and Revisions of the Psyche” attempts to read it as the analgesic fantasy of an expiring brain – i.e. the comforting near-death experience of someone who then proceeds to die.
22 Robertson, “Hystery, Herstory, History,” 472, 476.
23 Wiesel, From the Kingdom of Memory, 165.
24 Roth, Memory, Trauma and History, 92.
25 Thomas, Memories and Hallucinations, 47.
26 Lang’s position is here summarized by Haydon White in Figural Realism, 33–4.
27 Lang, Holocaust Representation, 22–3.
28 Delbo, Auschwitz and After, 257, 263.
29 Delbo, Auschwitz and After, 260.
30 Rothberg, Traumatic Realism, 173.
31 Wiesel, One Generation After, 15.
32 Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 207.
33 Morris, The Evil Hours, 65–7. Within these passages, Morris quotes from Halifax, Shamanic Voices, 3, 5.
34 White, Figural Realism, 69–70.