From Excess to Origin: Traversing Time Zones as an Act of Redemption in The Man who Never Stopped Sleeping by Aharon Appelfeld

Abstract

In this paper I will address an aspect of the literary work of Aaron Appelfeld, that binds the traumatic experience of the Holocaust with a religious state of mind and with poetic writing. I will illustrate my position by referring to Appelfeld’s book The Man who never stopped sleeping. I will link religiosity to a strategy of circumventing traumatic memory. In my view, Appelfeld’s coping with the traumatic memory involves substitution of the void of the trauma with adherence to religiosity, which is identified with an ecstatic act of poetic writing. For Appelfeld, as expressed for example in his First Person Essays (1979), religiosity represents the experience, emotion and personal attitude to the transcendental, which is also intimately related to creative writing. In his view, the unspoken residue of the trauma points toward the beginning of his own life and also that of his ancestors. The trajectory of the route which Appelfeld follows in re-connecting to life takes him backwards to the primordial sources of his family. This is a morbid act with an Orphic dimension, yet for Appelfeld is a source of life. In his return home, to the “beginnings”, his parents and grandparents and grand-grandparents, Appelfeled seemingly returns to the pre-traumatic time, mending the shattered fragments via his writing while attempting to heal his threatened Self.