Narrative Constructs and Border Transgressions in Holocaust Literature Within the American Context‪.‬

Michael McKeon states, in his introduction to the anthology Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, that a genre is "a problem solving model on the level of form" (1). One is tempted to "consider each work as an isolated case, a 'trait' in search of a 'type'" (4). This approach suits the novel as form encompassing extremely heterogeneous matter. After production and consumption what remains is, as Alain Robbe-Grillet declares, "the perceived object," a "partial" and "provisional" signification (McKeon 804). Both writer and reader accede to reality via the betraying slippery words. The language they put together, writing and reading, is loaded with personal cultural memory. When the reality represented in novelistic matrix is as traumatic and uncanny as the Holocaust, then genre has to get adjusted to the sinuous, tricky psyche remembering and attempting to communicate. Trauma blocks for a long while the capacity to reminisce and express. One tells the catastrophic story abiding by the rules of the affected brain and soul of the witness, participant, or perpetrator.