Adrian Matus reviews Eduardo Halfon’s Tarentule, Quai Voltaire, Paris, 2024, 220p. (originally published in Spanish as Tarántula, Libros del Asteroide, 2024, 184 p.)
Adrian Matus is an editor at the Review of Democracy.
How should we engage young generations with the traumas of the twentieth century? Pedagogues were aware for decades, if not centuries, that traditional formal reading assignments often fail to convey the emotional gravity of historical events. In this context, experiential learning through re-enactments or simulations seems to be a relevant pedagogical alternative. Historians, museum practitioners, teachers, and non-formal educators use this approach to convey empathy and historical responsibility. Yet, the question that naturally arises is: are there any limitations of this approach? To what extent could experiential learning obscure the meaning of sensitive topics rather than reveal them?
Eduardo Halfon’s Tarentule offers an unsettling answer to this question. The novel revolves around a haunting episode in the author’s life: a summer camp in Guatemala that intended to foster cohesion and create a sense of Jewish identity in the Latin American diaspora quickly turned into a traumatic event. Despite being framed as a fiction, the narrative includes many autobiographic aspects.
The reader can learn the broader biographical context of the author from the very first pages: Halfon was born in Guatemala and then moved to the United States in the 1980s. Thus, throughout his writings, a constant reflection follows the notion of diasporic communities, globalization and historical awareness, as he stated in a recent interview. The Polish Boxer (published in Spanish in 2008, translated in English in 2012) catalyzed the rise of the author to the international literary scene, as it received international awards, such as the New York Times Editors’ Choice selection. The following novels, among which Mourning and Monastery were extremely well received by the audience. His latest novel, Tarentule, confirmed Halfon’s evolution: it received the prestigious Prix Médicis Étranger in November 2024 for the French translation of his novel, published at Quai Voltaire.
‘Acting Out’ vs. ‘Working Through’
The heart of the story brings into focus a haunting episode from the narrator’s adolescence. As a teenager, he participated in what initially was thought to be a Jewish children summer camp in Guatemala. After a few days, the real scope of the camp was unveiled to the participants. The instructors designed a pedagogical experiment that went too far.
With the hope to instill historical consciousness, they re-created a bad-taste simulation of Holocaust conditions for the young participants.
As this event left a strong memory, Eduardo Halfon revisits it with the hopes of understanding it forty years after this haunting experience. Thus, the literary text is a testimony which reveals the tension between memory and history. A second focus, less developed in previous literary reviews of this book, is the long-term implications of misleading experiential learning activities. If we use this perspective, Halfon’s book provides a clear question to the vexing question: “To what extent historical re-enactment through embodied fear can transmit a pedagogical message?” For him, the answer is straightforward: dramatizing the Holocaust created unsettled emotional payoffs that cannot be fully articulated. Thus, this novel brings an important claim in the broader discussion regarding the limits of representation of traumas, but also on the ethics and responsibility on teaching sensitive topics.
The debate around historical re-enactment is not new. On a broader level, the risks of the historical re-enactment were already raised from different standing points from the mid-1980s. One particular example in this debate is French director Claude Lazmann’s refusal of dramatization in his documentary Shoah. His reason was to avoid the reduction of the Holocaust to a form of pedagogical voyeurism. Later, the American historian Dominick LaCapra’s distinction shed further light on this issue. He distinguishes between ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’ trauma and reveals the delicate nuances on this matter:
“There are two very broad ways of coming to terms with transference, or with one’s transferential implication in the object of study: acting out; and working through. Acting out is related to repetition, and even the repetition-compulsion – the tendency to repeat something compulsively.”
”In working through, the person tries to gain critical distance on a problem, to be able to distinguish between past, present and future. For the victim, this means his ability to say to himself, “Yes, that happened to me back then. It was distressing, overwhelming, perhaps I can’t entirely disengage myself from it, but I’m existing here and now, and this is different from back then.”
To echo LaCapra’s thoughts, instead of creating a historical reflection, the pedagogical experiment locked the boys into a loop of ritualized humiliation through merely acting out and missing never reaching the working through. Tarentule echoes in this regard LaCapra by exposing the risks of trauma performances, which might turn out to be coercive and disciplinary. In this way, by taking the autobiographical example of the 13-year-old teenager exposed to this pedagogical experiment, it makes much broader claims, which are then introduced gradually to a wide audience.
The novel unfolds on two plans. In the first plan, the adult narrator, based in Berlin, meets a childhood friend and they recall a specific memory from their teenage years. This recall constitutes the second plan, which focuses on the summer camp organized in Guatemala by a Jewish community. The recall is depicted with great accuracy, placing the reader in the midst of emotional uneasiness. The constant voice throughout the novel emphasizes one element. The trauma of the camp re-enactment (and the Holocaust) was not processed after the experience itself; the adult narrator finds himself oftentimes unable to write and verbalize the trauma. The end of the novel does not bring a clear solution; instead, it puts an emphasis on the introspective ambiguity.
Absent Catharsis
This unsolved trauma, which pendulates in the text between the mature author and the return to the childhood episode from Guatemala, is more than a recollection.
In this regard, the absent catharsis is supported by the novel’s symbols.
The camp or the tarantula support the author’s claim on the debate about the ethics of teaching and discussing traumatic events. One of the symbols that recurrently appears is the camp. Whilst in the first chapters it is represented as a summer camp in which pupils meet and socialize, learn how to filter water in nature, how to make a rope, how to start a fire from the sun rays, gradually the camp receives new meanings. It becomes a re-staging of a totalitarian regime concentration camp with strict hierarchies and bodily punishments, which lead to dehumanization. By the end, the camp becomes an allegory for a failed pedagogical project, in which confusion replaces reflection. Thus, the use of the camp reinforces LaCapra’s distinction between acting out and working through, insisting on the risks of using only the first component only.
Other symbols support the claim of absent catharsis as well. The uniform further enhances the meaning of identity dissolution and erasure (p.14). Through its use, Halfon emphasizes again the importance of proper reflection, absent in this case. Through the act of forcing the participants to have uniforms, the reader can clearly see the risks of perpetuating the trauma. The third element that closely follows this is the silence, which means the inability of the author to fully grasp in an articulated way the experiment in all its complexity. The use of such symbols reinforces again and again the impact of misleading educational experiments.
Another key point in which Tarentule proves its originality is the deconstruction of the idea that the self can be archived.
The novel claims that the historical memory is never whole. Instead, after such traumatic events, the memory is always reconstructed, staged, often misremembered and mediated through other narratives.
By 2025, this claim is long from being new. Yet, innovation stands in the delivery: it owes more to the modernist forms than to postmodernism, but at the same time it does not fall into the traps of aestheticism. The text is the result of the tension between narration and silence, between self’s desire to understand his own and grandfather’s memory incoherences (pp.27-28). In the case of the latter, the author even mentions the limits by even clearly stating: the narrative might not be accurate.
Such moves might be risky, though. These deliberate ambiguities and disrupted narratives can create misreadings. Whilst reflecting on the troubling event of the camp, the use of symbols might create confusion for a broader audience. The symbol of the tarantula is never fully explained in the novel, only in the interviews.Its lack of fixed meaning can provide again, a large set of vague interpretations for different readers and can enhance ethical confusions.
Nevertheless, these lines of interpretations might be marginal and the overall message of the failure of such experiential learning experiments is clearly conveyed. In this regard, the novel is on one hand clearly inscribed into the debate around the limits of representation of the Holocaust. At the same time, pedagogues, teachers, museum practitioners and non-formal teachers might find this novel as a warning. Tarentule exposes the risks of experiential education without considering the essential ethical component. It shows that without clear contextualization, attempts to ‘make real’ historical traumas may lead to confusion, fear, and shame. Some experiences cannot be replicated, and throughout Tarentule, Halfon tells us why.
