Undermining the Hierarchy of Grief in Rachel Seiffert's A Boy in Winter

• Autores: Paula Romo-Mayor
• Localización: The Poetics and Ethics of (Un-)Grievality in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction / coord. por Susana Onega Jaén, Jean-Michel Ganteau, 2023, ISBN 978-1-03-238976-9, págs. 36-54
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • A common ploy of societies in conflict is to restrict the domain of grievability through the dehumanisation of the other. During the Third Reich (1933–45), the denial of full humanness to Jews and other racial minorities, handicapped Germans, homosexuals and political dissidents legitimised Nazi violence. However, after the war, the exclusion from public memory of the atrocities perpetrated against German civilians prevented the defeated survivors from mourning their losses. In her fourth novel, A Boy in Winter (2017), Rachel Seiffert, a British author with Nazi ancestors, provides an encompassing view of the Nazi invasion of Ukraine through the encounter of Jewish, German and Ukrainian characters. The chapter proposes a reading of the novel from the perspective of Holocaust Studies and Ethics. Its aim is to demonstrate that the interplay of the different narrative perspectives erases the possibility of imposing the Nazi discourse of power, and that the encounter between antagonistic characters leads to the recognition of the precariousness of the human condition in the life of the other. More generally, it underscores Seiffert’s narrative as a space where human lives are interdependent and every human loss is equally grievable.