Barbárie e memória em Michel Laub: uma leitura da obra Diário da queda

Abstract

A significant part of contemporary Brazilian literary production invests in the fictionalization of traumatic historical events – genocides, military dictatorships, etc. – and contributes to the maintenance of the memory of barbarism. From this perspective, the present research investigates how Michel Laub’s Diary of the fall intertwines the memory of a collective historical trauma – the Holocaust – with the identity construction of the fictional subject. Published in 2011, the author’s narrative is included among the most recent Brazilian productions of Jewish origin that focus on Shoah – Catastrophe, in Hebrew. Told in the first person, the Laub’s novel presents a conflict between three temporalities marked by trauma: of the grandfather, a survivor of Auschwitz; of the narrator's father, who, at the age of fourteen, is dealing with his father’s suicide; and the narrator-character, who has problems in adult life – alcoholism and aggressiveness – related to the intergenerational trauma and the fall of his classmate João, at the age of thirteen. In the work, writing appears as a manner of each character deals with the memory of trauma. Thus, we observe: in the notebooks of entries written by the grandfather, the indirect testimony of the barbarism experienced in the concentration camp, as well as the persistence of trauma in the psychic survivor; in the narrator1s father1s writing, the fight against Alzheimer’s erasure; and, in the diary written by the narrator – which is also the Diary – and intended for the unborn child, an attempt to elaborate on the traumas of the past. The extreme barbarism of the 20th century requires not only a new representational model, but also an ethical positioning of the subject who, through art, takes it up again. We are interested in investigating how Laub (2011) articulates the conflicts around the memory of trauma through an ethical-aesthetic project – from the work Diary – which incorporates the representational challenges imposed on art and tries to capture barbarism through its fragmentary form and repetition as a mechanism for the manifestation of trauma. We discuss how the Brazilian writer makes use of a literary form compatible with the impacting theme of Hitler’s genocide, in the direction pointed out by Theodor W. Adorno (2003), of an isomorphy between content and form. Laub’s novel is composed by the intertwining of three distinct temporalities that are articulated in a fragmentary and unfinished form, which mimics the very incompleteness of memory and reinforces the impossibility of capturing traumatic events “in a stable mimetic framework”. The imagery and lexical repetition give the novel a spiraling aspect, at the same time that it refers to the survival of the Holocaust memory in later generations and manifests the persistence of the memory of the trauma. Jewish heritage, as a significant part of this legacy memory, also plays an important role in generational conflicts throughout the narrative.