Loose Bits of Shrapnel: War Stories, Photographs, and the Peculiarities of Postmemory
2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 41; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ohr/ohu019
ISSN1533-8592
Autores Tópico(s)Photography and Visual Culture
ResumoAbstractThis article traces the paradoxical effects of my father's World War II stories and a series of published photographs on my brother and me. It is a self-reflexive essay that also engages the Holocaust historiography on intergenerational legacies of the Holocaust and critiques the "transmitted trauma" concept. Instead, a vocabulary of gendered absence, anxiety, and disappointment is presented, and postmemories that were co-constructed in father-son relationships are imagined to be like shrapnel. It also argues that intergenerational legacies are less about past violence and more about parents' ability or inability to work through their emotions to be "good enough" parents in children's daily lives. In closing, the unfolding dynamic between second and third generations in my own family is considered.Keywordsphotographspostmemorytraumawar stories Notes1 Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (London: Vintage Books, 2005), xiv. 2 Ronald Field, interviewed by Sean Field, Cape Town, August 11, 2012.3 London: Odhams Press, 1943. Neither the editor/curator of the collection nor the photographers are named in the publication.4 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Marianne Hirsch, "The Generation of Postmemory," Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (2008): 103–28; Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 5 See, for example, Helen Epstein, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Holocaust Survivors (London: Penguin Books, 1979); Aaron Haas, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Dina Wardi, Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust (London: Routledge, 1992); Gabrielle Rosenthal, ed., The Holocaust in Three Generations: Families of Victims and Perpetrators of the Nazi Regime (Opladen, Germany: Barbara Budrich Publishers, 2010). 6 See Elizabeth Edwards, Visual Sense: A Cultural Reader (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2008). 7 Alexander Freund and Alistair Thomson, eds., Oral History and Photography (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 8 This family history sketch is slanted toward my father's lineage. My mother's family ( nee Carstens) has a lineage that stems from French Huguenot refugees intermarrying with Dutch farmers. Her parents were tenant farmers in the rural hinterland of Cape Town, displaced by drought and depression in the 1930s. 9 John Field, in conversation with Sean Field, Cape Town, circa 1970s.10 For a detailed account of D-Day, see Anthony Beevor, D-Day: The Battle for Normandy (London: Penguin Books, 2009). 11 John Field, in conversation with Sean Field, Cape Town, circa 1960s and 1970s.12 See David Scott Daniell, The Royal Hampshire Regiment, 1918–54 , vol. 3 (Aldershot: Gale and Polden, 1955). 13 John Field, in conversation with Sean Field, Cape Town, December 27, 2012.14 This story was previously told in fragments, circa 1970s, but I recently elicited a fuller exposition on December 15, 2013.15 John Field, in conversation with Sean Field, Cape Town, December 27, 2013.16 John Field, in conversation with Sean Field, Cape Town, December 27, 2012.17 The only contact he allowed was letter correspondence between his favorite sister "Baby" and my mother. This culminated in the sister's visit to us in the 1970s.18 Sadly, my sister on the one hand, and my brother and I on the other hand, have not been on speaking terms for several years. I prefer not to comment on how she was shaped by our family history, although it is significant that this sibling rupture involved disagreements over the care of my aged father.19 Quotation taken from an online regimental history, accessed August 13, 2012, www.hampshireregiment.co.uk/historypages/history1.htm/20 John Field, in conversation with Sean Field, Cape Town, circa 2008.21 Hoffman, After Such Knowledge , 16. 22 Ronald Field, interviewed by Sean Field, Cape Town, August 11, 18, and 25, 2012. Our compulsion to look at these photographs resonates with Susan Sontag's question about photographs of human suffering: "Which atrocities from the incurable past do we think we are obliged to revisit?" Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 83. 23 Here and throughout, these are the captions that accompanied the photographs. The pages were not numbered. All photographs are reproduced from The War's Best Photographs: Pictorial Masterpieces of the Greatest Struggle the World has Known (London: Odhams Press, 1943). 24 Ronald Field, interviewed by Sean Field, Cape Town, August 11, 2012.25 See, for example, Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 26 My sister was interested in my father's war stories but did not display the same intense need as my brother and me, and she did not engage with the photographic book.27 Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory , 166. 28 Hirsch, Family Frames , 21. 29 Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 7. 30 See Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 31 Hirsch, Family Frames , 23. 32 For a superb self-reflexive account of his family history, see Ronald Fraser, In Search of a Past: The Manor House, Amnersfield, 1933–1945 ( London: Verso, 1985). 33 There is a considerable literature on the importance of fathering to children's development. See, for example, Linda Richter and Rob Morrell, eds., Baba, Men and Fatherhood in South Africa (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2006); Elizabeth C. Cooksey and Michelle M. Fondell, "Spending time with his kids: effects of family structure on fathers' and children's lives," Journal of Marriage and the Family 58, no. 3 (1996): 693–707. 34 An anonymous reviewer asked, "What if images were seen in isolation, with no stories of war or father or understanding of specific family dynamic?" I suspect our emotional investment in these images would have been far less. It is the soldier father, storyteller, and emotionally absent parent who framed our childhood looking at these photographs.35 See Susan Faludi , Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: William Morrow, 1999). On war veterans, she notes that "their bloody paths to virility were not ones they sought to pass on, or usually even discuss. Because the fathers offered few particulars about their 'baptisms' at Normandy or Midway or Heartbreak Ridge, war was a remote romance that each boy had had to embellish with details culled from Sergeant Rock and his combat adventures in DC comics" (5). Thanks to Rob Morrell for this quote. 36 Thames Television, The World at War (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1973). 37 The companion article is: Sean Field, "'Shooting at Shadows': Private John Field, war stories and why he would not be interviewed," Oral History 41, no. 2 (2013): 75–86. 38 Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 3. 39 Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory , 107. 40 Ibid., 106.41 For a history of the concept "trauma," see Didier Fassen and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 42 For a critique of "trauma theories," see Susannah Radstone and Ruth Hodgkin, eds., Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory (London: Routledge, 2003). See also Dominic LaCapra, Writing Trauma, Writing History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). His solution to the referential problem involves a distinction between "historical trauma" (as experiences datable in time and space) in contrast to "structural trauma" (which is not datable) that occurs during early childhood as the child begins to necessarily separate from the primary caregiver and constructs a sense of self by acquiring language and other symbols. 43 Yael Danieli, ed., International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma (New York: Plenum Press, 1998). 44 For an overview of oral history conceptions of intersubjectivity, see Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2010), 54–77. On intersubjectivity in psychotherapy, see Chris Jaenicke, The Risk of Relatedness: Intersubjectivity Theory in Clinical Practice (New York: Jason Aronson, 2008). 45 See Hank Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony (St. Paul: Paragon House, 2010), 63–73. 46 Hoffman, After Such Knowledge , 66. 47 These hurts might be termed "narcissistic wound(s)." This term was originally coined by Freud but has been developed further by psychoanalytic self-psychology. See, for example, Heinz Kohut, "Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage," in The Search for the Self, vol. 2, 615–58 (New York: International Universities Press, 1972). 48 Graham Lindegger, "The Father in the Mind," in Baba, Men and Fatherhood in South Africa , 22. 49 Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory , 18. Hirsch rightly points out that mother-daughter and father-son relationships (and other variations) frame the "transmission" of legacies in gendered ways. But how gendered ideas and practices shape parenting styles and intergenerational legacies after mass violence across cultural contexts requires more research. 50 See Michael J. Diamond, "Fathers with Sons: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on 'Good Enough' Fathering Throughout the Life-Cycle," Gender and Psychoanalysis 3 (1998): 243–99. 51 Bruno Bettleheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (London: Penguin Books, 1976). 52 This article has built a story from this association. Hank Greenspan has argued that where there was not a story, a story has to be made by narrators. See Henry Greenspan, "Collaborative Interpretation of Survivors' Accounts: A Radical Challenge to Conventional Practice," Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 17, no. 1 (2011): 85–100. 53 Years of psychoanalytic psychotherapy have helped me work through these legacies, but the disconnected relationship to my father is an "incurable" legacy that I have accepted will always remain a feature of my unconscious. My father's recent willingness to connect with his sons late in life has been unexpected and profound.54 My ex-wife (and mother to Ella and Liam) has read this article and for professional reasons has asked to remain anonymous.55 Hoffman, After Such Memories, 103. 56 Disappointment is central to psychoanalytic thinking about the maturation process. See Ian Craib, The Importance of Disappointment (London: Routledge, 1994). 57 Hoffman, After Such Knowledge, xv.
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