Images of Traumatic Memories: Intersections of Literature and Photography in the Novels of Riggs, Safran Foer and Seiffert

This work focuses on the analysis of three contemporary intermedial novels, that share the narration of traumatic events, like the Holocaust and the terroristic attack of 9/11, by means of photo-textual narration: The Dark Room (2001) by Rachel Seiffert, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2011) by Ransom Riggs and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2006) by Jonathan Safran Foer. In these hybrid novels, the protagonists deal with traumatic events related to the Shoah. Remarkably, these literary authors had no direct experience of the events at the base of their novels, but find themselves facing the arduous challenge of grasping traumatic memories inherited and never completely elaborated by the first generation. As it will be argued, the combination of photographs and verbal texts, declined into different modalities of representation, becomes the most suitable literary instrument to evoke and capture memories of trauma and loss. Indeed, the encounter with some significant photographic images allows the protagonists of the novels to gradually reconcile with their traumatic past. As material traces of the past, photographs are embodied forms of memory transmitted across generations that can foster physical changes in their observers. In these photo-textual narrations, the core question of memory needs to be investigated in both an intermedial dimension, as a combination between narration and image, and an interdisciplinary dimension, bringing together the perspective of cultural studies, as well as of neurosciences and psychology, with a specific focus on PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). In this context, the reader emerges as an active participant in the process of fiction-making, as the act of reading becomes a renewed act of witnessing and physical participation in the depicted events.