The weight of the other : Jean Laplanche and cultural traumat theory

This chapter explores the thematics of trauma in Imre Kertész's book Fateless, which narrates the incarceration in (and survival of) a Nazi extermination camp by a Jewish- Hungarian schoolboy, Gyuri Köves. Zolkos studies the metaphoric relation that Fateless delineates between trauma, spectrality and a community "haunted" by past violence. Her close reading of Fateless is divided into four segments: on communal violence towards trauma subjects and community as being-with the other; on the continuity of the catastrophic; on the strangeness of the other's love; and on writing-as-witnessing. Drawing on the alternative theory of trauma found in the works of Jean Laplanche, Zolkos offers a psychoanalytic reading of Fateless, arguing that the novel makes a contribution into two debates relevant to contemporary trauma studies. Firstly, the author points out that this narrative work concerns "the extraneous and subjective workings of trauma, and the distinction and relation between the psychic experience of trauma and a catastrophic event, which is external to and affects the psychic". Secondly, and most importantly, Zolkos explores the novel's enacting of "the individual-collective and intrapsychic-intersubjective working of trauma".