Tudo se ilumina como romance de mise-en-abyme: viagens e escritas como formas de acesso aos arquivos judaicos e familiares

Abstract

The article discusses how in the book Everything is Illuminated the travel experience of the character, who sets off in search of Jewish memories of his grandfather, consists of raw-material for the novel he is writing in order to secure a place in his family tree. Thus, we analyze how the meeting of Jonathan and Lista becomes the climax of the travel and the inspiration to write his novel. It can be argued that there is a circularity to the unarchiving of the memories of the Holocaust undertaken by the main character: The understanding that his place in the story begins with the trip to his grandfather’s homeland, but in the impossibility of a reconnection with the past, since the village sought does not exist anymore, this process continues in the fictional writing that recovers such happenings from the traces and residues left by what was experienced.