Autobiography of a Hybrid Narrative: Finding a Form for Trauma

Autobiography of a Hybrid Narrative: Finding a Form for Trauma The self is a hybrid, a churning hodge-podge of feeling, experience, shared narratives, memory, fantasy, and clichés, to name a few of the self's concatenated genres, that our ongoing process of self-narration stuffs into the pronoun “I.” As Daniel Dennett and others have argued, this process of self-narration – the process of telling ourselves the story of what we are doing, have done, will do – generates our sense of self, implying a coherent, continuous perspective, an “I,” who both lives and tells this story. The process of self-narration conceals the hybrid nature of our selves, enabling us to stuff the disparate materials that compose us, and the disparate modes and codes through which we make sense of them, into a single baggy form, a sort of picaresque autobiography. It's often said that trauma shatters our sense of self. More precisely, trauma interferes with the ongoing process of self-narration, collapsing the distance between suffering and the story we try to tell about it, undermining the narrating perspective, the “I,” that stands beyond experience, reflecting upon it, interpreting it, relating one experience to another and incorporating all of them into an omnivorous narrative that subsumes and digests them all. Trauma is experience that cannot be subsumed, cannot be digested, cannot be narrated as past because it is always present. Trauma interrupts our self-generating story, exposing the multifarious modes and materials the genre of self-narration enables us to think of as coherent, continuous selves. For writers, representing characters wrestling with trauma represents an opportunity to explore the hybridity of self, to see what's at stake, on the most intimate level, when we confront the incompatibility of our various modes of making sense of ourselves, and to see if we can develop more capacious modes of self-narration that embrace rather than concealing the hybridity of the self. Those questions are at the heart of The Book of Anna, which consists of diary entries and autobiographical poems written in the voice of Anna Asher, a fictional Czech-German Jew who spent her adolescence in a concentration camp and now lives in mid-1950's Prague. When that brief biography came to me, I had no idea that Anna and I would spend the next five years struggling to find ways to tell the story of her life. At first, I thought that I would have it easy. A handful of short, brutal first-person lyrics alluding to Anna's concentration-camp experience tumbled out in a matter of days. My drafts seemed successful by lyric standards–the voice was urgent, the language dense with suggestive image and metaphor. But when I tried to revise them, I realized that the lyric form was excluding rather than expressing Anna's character and life. It took me months to break down and break open my lyric conception of form. I was afraid of what might lie beyond lyric's safely circumscribed allusions, afraid that if I let myself discover the details of Anna's life, her traumas would expose the inadequacy of my familiar modes of representing the self. For months, I tried to avoid admitting what seems obvious in retrospect: Anna's character and life couldn't be expressed in a single form; her voice, her story, her self, demanded hybridity. Anna's voice, emotionally charged and wildly associative, was a natural fit for first-person lyric, but that voice was trying to tell a story, a story composed of many stories of narration-confounding trauma. Indeed, part of Anna's story was her inability to tell these stories; her concentration camp experiences had destroyed her faith in narrative, along with all the other means she had to give meaning to her life. As Anna attempted to tell her stories, her narratives kept erupting into lyric outbursts that implied further narrative. Anna's life would only allow itself to be told through a hybrid of first-person lyric and narrative forms. Once I committed to discovering Anna's stories, I saw that Anna's skepticism about self-narration was well-founded: there was no single narrative form that could fit abandonment by her mother, repeated rape, forced concentration-camp bedspring abortion, to list only a few of her traumas. Each trauma posed different psychological, moral and narrative problems; each required different forms and combinations of narrative and lyric. As these poems grew into a sequence, Anna's life and self were emerging. But each poem-story was too long, too fragmented, too complex, a fiction-writer friend told me, for readers to understand them as parts of a larger story. He suggested adding another layer of hybridization: interspersing the poems with prose in which Anna reflects on how each poem relates to her life in the present. Those prose entries became a diary (one entry of which is reproduced in this volume) that revealed aspects of Anna–her writing process, her relationships with neighbors, her obsessive sexual behavior, her chain-smoking, her idiosyncratic exploration of Jewish tradition–that offered context for the poems. The juxtaposition of Anna's blunt prose about the present with her poetic narration of the past generated dialogic relationships between these forms and their content. The prose self-narration foreshadowed and commented upon the poetry, embedding traumatic past in writerly present; the poems challenged the bitter assurance of the prose, exposing the pretense, the fragility, of Anna's present-tense “I.” As this dialogic relationship continues, prose and poetry transform one another, and begin to interpenetrate. The diary entries grow more allusive, more lyric; the voice in the poems less high-flown, their narratives more coherent. As the book progresses, this dialogic relationship brings past and present closer and closer, until, in the final lines, they meet. When trauma exposes the hybridity of the self, it exposes the multiple, often incompatible, discourses, familial, cultural, aesthetic, psychological, religious, academic, through which we give meaning to what we live through. Anna's traumas destroyed her faith in these discourses as thoroughly as they destroyed her faith in self-narration. But just as she can't stop telling the story of her life, even when she doesn't believe there can be any such story, she cannot stop invoking discourses whose meaning-making pretenses seem to her pathetic and obscene: Get me another glass, he says. He could have been my father but the Lord planted me in another womb, where I grew dark and sharp to the crash of Chopin polonaises. (from “Tamar,” 20) Throughout her poems, Anna hybridizes fragments of discordant, discredited discourses–here we see some of her favorite whipping-boys, realism (“Get me another glass, he says”), Biblical narration (“the Lord planted me”), musical Romanticism (“Chopin Polonaises”) and the aestheticism it epitomizes–forcing them into uneasy intimacy that ironizes and undermines them even as she invokes them. But of all the discourses Anna transmogrifies through hybridization, the discourses she invokes most obsessively are those that represent Jewish tradition, particularly those that participate in the Biblically rooted, rabbinically elaborated conviction that Jewish history reflects and reveals the presence of God. Using bits of Biblical narrative and poetry, Talmudic and post-rabbinic traditions, to tell her stories of meaning-mooting trauma, Anna mocks Jewish tradition's inability to escape or explain the Holocaust. At the same time, though, by forcing them into the service of her self-narration, Anna revitalizes these discourses, freeing them from piety and predictability, imbuing them with her own urgency, her skepticism, her obscenity, her despair. For example, in “Song of Songs: 8 sessions with Dr. Solomon,” excerpted in this volume, Anna combines language drawn from the Biblical Song of Songs, rabbinic interpretations of the poem as an allegory of the love between God and the Jewish people, and the “Jewish science” of psychoanalysis, to portray her concentration camp experiences as a series of violent sexual encounters between God and the women who designated the teenage Anna their survivor. This God is Lord of both life and death, a hybrid God who presides over incomprehensible murder and equally incomprehensible deliverance. “How can you hide from what never goes away?” Anna's pious barracks-mate, the Rebbetzin, asks at the end of the excerpt that follows this essay. Anna doesn't hide. She fuses Biblicalpoetry, rabbinic allegory and concentration camp narrative into a hybrid, metaphoric space, a ...harem of the dead Where a God whose love is stronger than wine, and kinkier Than the Rebbetzin admitted Sniffs among His women... This hybrid space catches God in the act, exposing God as unforgivably implicated in the horrors Anna witnessed and endured in the camps. But at this point in the book–midway–Anna is also trapped in the “harem of the dead,” experiencing its horrors from each of her hybridized perspectives. By the final poem in the book, Anna has found in hybridization a means not just of expressing the past but of surviving it. Hybridization becomes, for her, a mode of self-narration, one that is capacious enough, skeptical enough, and generous enough to combine the traumas she has suffered, the love she has known, the discourses she has scorned, the Jewish traditions she has pastiched, into a sense of self, a self that, despite it all, because of it all, remains alive and writing.