Mimicry, auto-fiction, genealogy. Playing (down) trauma, reconstructing autobiography in the postmemory writing of Monika Rakusa

Abstract

The article aims to address one of the borderline cases of contemporary autobiographical narratives. Being aware of the limitations characteristic of postmemory practices, the writing of Monika Rakusa creates a self-reflective and ironic variety of postmemory biographical prose, undertaking a complex game with auto-fictional and genre forms (e.g. diaries/blogs typical of life writing and diaries alluding to that of Bridget Jones). The ironic strategy of creating genological ‘mixtures’ captures the perplexities of the hybridised positioning of the Jewish identity of the narrator, who, on the one hand, struggles with intergenerational trauma, anti- Semitism and the indefinable status of her subaltern background and, on the other, is aware of the performative nature of both her own and social biographical practices/compulsions, and seems to be caught up in the mechanisms of mimicry described by Homi Bhabha, the pretense of another identity as a continuation of the strategy of hiding and masking Jewishness. This article investigates at length the relationship between auto-fiction, post-memory and autobiographical modality of family narratives and the ironic distancing techniques contained in three prose texts: 39,9 [39.9]; the short story collection titled Cień [Shadow] and the novel Żona Adama [Adam’s Wife]. In t hese successive variants of ‘parabiography’ (Artur Sandauer), literariness exposed auto-fictionally as a particular form of ‘wounding mimicry’ mediates both the areas of ‘Jewish’ experience of anti-Semitism and trauma, and the conventional formulas of sincerity of life writing, which are treated at a distance, as well as postmemory efforts to understand the past and the ironic symptoms of mimicry.