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Abstract :
[en] In an interview closely following on the release of The History of Love, Krauss made it clear that, contrary to what some critics had ventured, her second novel was not about Holocaust survivors. “I am the grandchild of people who survived that historical event,” Krauss pointed out. “I’m not writing their story – I couldn’t write their story […]. What interests me is the response to catastrophic loss.”
Great House, Krauss’s third novel, can be seen to further investigate this “response to catastrophic loss” – in a way which makes only tangential and mediated references to the Holocaust. The novel spans eighty years, starting from the near-end of World War 2, and traces the passing-on of a desk of massive proportions. Complete with nineteen drawers, one of which remains locked until it is symbolically revealed to be empty at the close of the book, the desk operates as some kind of trans-historical fetish for most of its successive keepers (and aspiring acquirers). Narrated through a set of five characters whose lives prove overshadowed less by the Holocaust itself than by its felt resonances in the psyches of loved ones, Great House is a polyphonic work that raises questions about the anatomy of ‘Holocaust postmemory’ (Marianne Hirsch), its temporality, but also its reification in conformity with defense mechanisms that take the form of death-denying fantasies. Here, while turning to the past, some clearly unreliable first-person narrators reveal their lifelong investment in fetishizing memories of themselves and others so as to better keep all sense of temporality and mortality at bay – in a way suggesting that fantasies of un-death have helped them fill in the gap left by the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust, and were later transmitted in lieu of ‘memory proper’. This paper will thus focus on Great House’s rich imagery, and its narrative strategies, in order to investigate Krauss’ representation of the paradoxes of Holocaust postmemory.
