Unrepresentability and Trauma of the Holocaust: Focusing on Ashes to Ashes and Sophie’s Choice

Abstract

Many Holocaust survivors have ‘failed experience’ as a trauma, and whenever they remember Auschwitz, they live paralyzed by the shame of being human and of having survived alone. Due to the ‘unrepresentability’ of the Holocaust, their experience is ‘disrupted,’ and they are unable to express or talk about their past experiences. It is because the nature of their experiences is in no way covered by the terms and positions the symbolic order offers to them. These survivors live with the horrors of the Holocaust trauma, but are haunted by them. Thus, when they verbalize their experience, the form they dictate is ‘discursive.’ Even now, decades after the fall of the Nazis, the Holocaust is as vivid as it was yesterday because of literary works as ‘survivor testimonial literature’ and films dealing with the tragedy, a representative product of the ‘memory industry’, which is constantly replaying this nightmare. Among them, Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes (1996) and Alan J. Pakula’s film Sophie’s Choice (1982) are evaluated as the most difficult and eerie examples. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the memories of the two heroines, which show the state of psychological dissociation caused by the trauma of the Holocaust in Ashes to Ashes and Sophie’s Choice, are converted into language. In these two works, the female protagonists only describe the Holocaust experience verbally rather than physically representing it, which makes it invisible and forces the audience to imagine the entire situation and thus consider that, although the way in which both works deal with the Holocaust is up to the author, it is up to us to properly see and accept the survivors through the history of memory.