La contradicción existente en nuestra sociedad entre un mundo que se desarrolla alejado de las tradiciones religiosas y el aluvión de obras literarias juveniles con asuntos transmundanos (ángeles, demonios, vampiros, cielo, infierno…), ha llevado al autor a reflexionar sobre lo que él llama la “paradoja del ateísmo”. ¿Cómo es posible tanta producción literaria basada en personajes y figuras que tienen su origen en el universo mental de las religiones cuando la vida cotidiana de los lectores de las mismas parece muy alejada de dichas cuestiones religiosas? A partir de esa constatación, el autor realiza una indagación en busca de las principales figuras de origen religioso que pueblan la literatura juvenil actual, analizando sus raíces y el significado simbólico de las mismas.
"We are of the same garden," H & eacute;l & egrave;ne Cixous writes about Jacques Derrida and herself in Rootprints. Born in Oran and Algiers respectively, both Franco-Maghrebin writers/thinkers indeed share the garden as a mythical figure of longing, loss and exile: the Jardin du Cercle militaire in Cixous's alg & eacute;riance and the Jardin d'Essai ("Garden of Essays"), as well as the family garden or "orchard," in Derrida's nostalg & eacute;rie, all symbolizing the expulsion from a promised land (Cixous when she was two and a half years old, Derrida at age eleven). For Derrida especially, the garden was a lost "intact PaRDeS" ("Circumfession"), a Talmudic Paradise from before the vowels, but also a "garden of reading" common to them both (Cixous, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint), while Cixous reminisces, in the "Expelled" section of "This Stranjew Body," how she felt admitted into the "second and last paradise, that after which there was nothing more to lose," symbolized by the "Garden of Essays" with its homophonic d & eacute;c & egrave;s (demise). The aim of this essay is to situate this shared problematic of an exilic, real as much as literary, political as much as poetic garden in relation to its manifold associations with WW2 and their families' displacement (which, especially in Derrida's case, triggered off a deep-seated abhorrence of rootedness and belonging, and, in Cixous's case, an incessant questioning about departing/fleeing vs. arriving/staying). Their mutual evocations of this partly fantasized 'primitive scene' of a forbidden/lost (and, for Cixous, found and lost again) garden, alongside the many other gardens conjured up especially in Cixous's writings (for e. g. "A True Garden"), will allow us to assess in what ways the irrecoverable sense of traumatic loss leading to exile, exodus and uprootedness, including from/within the self, is both evoked and redeemed by the imaginary, transformative work of literature.
My article examines a single, capacious piece of evidence - a dream recorded by the modernist Russian-Jewish poet Samuil Kissin (1885-1916) in a wartime notebook - and asks what that record reveals about Jewish experience and self-identification on the Eastern Front during WW1. I situate Kissin's dream in its local historical context of expulsions, (self-)censorship, and widespread anti-Jewish violence, and compare the dream's imagery and cultural patterns with contemporaneous poetic responses by Vladislav Khodasevich. Methodologically, the essay treats dream reports as a distinct kind of testimony: often fragmentary and private, such records register affective and cognitive dissonances that public genres may erase or suppress. Reading Kissin's dream record alongside Khodasevich's poems allows us to trace how private oneiric expression (along the lines of Dominick LaCapra's version of Freud's 'acting out') and later poetic elaboration ('working through') negotiate the trauma of Russian-Jewish identity under wartime conditions.
