In the face of catastrophes such as the Shoah, poetry assumes the functions of memory, communication and the creation of meaning within the trauma's topographies of the “unspeakable.” It supersedes other symbolic systems that are unable to cope in such contexts. In order to shed light on the precise impact of catastrophe on literary creativity, this article looks at the post-Auschwitz poetics of Danilo Kiš (1935–89), a Yugoslav writer of Hungarian-Jewish-Montenegrin descent whose work engages in a search for new aesthetic forms of remembering the Jewish past. The following will outline the artistic techniques which Kiš applied or developed to express the Jewish experience in his writing, inscribing it into the memory of literature itself. The focus will be on two of Kiš's novels: Hourglass (Peščanik, 1972), a novel that draws a psychological “map” of a Jewish survivor of the so-called Novi Sad raid in January 1942, demonstrating just how closely imbricated catastrophe and creativity are, and A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča, 1976) which shows Kiš's work to be constructed as a “mnemo-poetic” palimpsest.

Defamiliarization — A New Way of Seeing

In Hourglass, the Jewish protagonist, Eduard Sam, only appears as the initials E.S. (an abbreviation which can, significantly, be read as Es, the Freudian Id).