Abstract
The father motif is studied through the lens of re-writing in Jerome Charyn’s works of fiction, nonfiction, autofiction, as well as prefaces and interviews. In those pages, the biological father is endowed with a literary presence and thus “transferred” from the unconscious to the consciousness of writing. As the son selectively remembers his dysfunctional father, a shellshocked Polish immigrant, a series of texts gradually develops on him. This portrait is oblique and serial, because it does not rely on a unique text and is formed by an accumulation of images: repetition and imitation first make for a hyperbolized characterization of Sam Charyn as an « idiot », ridiculous in the eyes of his child, before allowing for more polysemous variations on the father theme. Such a literary rumination encourages Charyn to verbalize trauma, that of his illiterate childhood spent in the post-war Bronx with a violent father, in the form of a textual palimpsest. In so doing he steps away from it, aided by the process of language which both permits distance from the father and enhances closeness with him. This literary echolalia works not as a rational method but as an affective process that involves forgetting and recreating the father, and which ultimately gives birth to a renewed meaning of filiation.
Keywords : trauma, memory, repetition, fatherhood, echolalia, idiocy, autofiction
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