"And if thou searchest out my sin / I shall flee from thee to thee"

On a Traumatic Picaresque

Abstract

The essay deals with David Grossman’s novel Until the End of the Land as a political text embodying personal and communal trauma both in its plot and in its textual structure and language. Suggesting the concept of pre-trauma, the notion of temporal collapse, and the generic distinction of the traumatic picaresque, it follows the construction of the illusion of a post-traumatic rehabilitation and its inevitable failure against the background of the recent history of Israel. The essay examines in detail the main spatial strategy of the text with which both the physical and the mental trauma-spaces are constructed, and the linguistic technique which allows both the characters and the narrator to flee from trauma to words.