The (Im)possibility of Forgetting in Jenna Blum's Novel Those Who Save Us

1. IntroductionRemembering and forgetting have always been of key issues in studies on trauma and traumatic experience, since one hardly exists without other. On one hand, traumatised feel need to forget their unpleasant and painful past, but on other hand, they have to tell about it in order to work it through. Telling is not possible without remembering, but that is repressed cannot be remembered, put into one's narrative and integrated into self. Therefore, it seems that issue of and forgetting is similar to vicious circle. In trauma and memory studies, various specialists (such as Cathy Caruth (1995), Nicola King (2003), Roget Luckhurst (2008), Anne Whitehead (2011) and others) address this issue, therefore, their insights will be reviewed and later applied in analysis of Jenna Blum's novel Those Who Save Us (2004) in which and forgetting can be seen as central theme.2. On trauma, and forgettingTrauma, and forgetting are very interrelated phenomena. In trauma studies it is assumed that if trauma is not fully experienced when it happens, it cannot be described at any time, but it haunts traumatised as memory that is repeated again and again and thus is experienced later than at instance of traumatic event (Whitehead 2011: 5). Nicola King refers to this phenomenon as rememory that is a cyclical return to an earlier traumatic moment which is remembered in present, in greater detail and with greater affect at each recurrence (King 2003: 21). In other words, trauma does not stay in past and constantly reminds about in various ways in present. Moreover, according to Gabriele Schwab (Schwab 2010: 42), there is neither life nor history without trauma, since trauma as such symbolises deep history crisis, because [t]he traumatized [...] carry an impossible history within them, or they themselves become symptom of history that they cannot entirely possess (Caruth 1995: 5) and reflect on. Therefore, Kirby Farrell (1998: 5) suggests that it is possible to claim that experience of every generation is potentially traumatic, since all generations face situations that are related to death or other unpleasant traumatic events. Similarly, in Writings on Psychoanalysis, Louis Althusser (1996: 22) states that all people can be called witnesses and victims of various events that they do not remember due to constant forgetting in battle between life and death, because those who do not die are marked by such experience forever, and although their traumatic experiences may not be accessible in memories of past, they can reveal themselves through health problems (Bonanno 2004: 24) or particular behaviour (Caruth 1995: viii). This behaviour can demonstrate that trauma has indeed been experienced, but probably because of prolonged latency period that, according to Roger Luckhurst (2008: 8), psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche has translated [...] as 'afterwardness', trauma is not remembered. Cathy Caruth (1995: viii) acknowledges that it is difficult to understand what it means to remember traumatic experiences and how to recognise traumas, because traumatic experiences is related to forgetting or even refusal to remember. Thus, link between and forgetting is evident.Very often traumatic experience is so painful that traumatised avoid and speaking about it. To be more precise, many [trauma] survivors are struck between natural release of unrepressed memory and unimaginable pain of remembering (Sanchez-Pardo 2010: 46). As result, it is difficult to tell what actually happened, because some events cannot be fully reconstructed or integrated into coherent story, since something in them will always resist recovery or 'passing on' (King 2003: 24). Hyden White (White 1980: 6) claims that the absence of narrative capacity or refusal of narrative indicates an absence or refusal of meaning itself as well. …