Abstract
What Happened to Those to Whom Nothing Happened at All? A Study (ongoing) explores the ways that traumatic knowledge is transmitted through generations across improbable lengths of time, even when it goes unspoken, or seems never to have happened. Using my family as subjects in a kind of case study, this novella-length essay is an attempt to understand the fragmentation and failures of communication in my family and inside my own brain in relation to the larger world’s. It borrows elements from the form and methods of a social science research narrative and is shaped by my lifelong search for theoretical frameworks that can connect fragmented or isolated phenomena across disparate lines of life and scales of experience—a search for causal, explanatory relationships that go beyond, or defy the logic of, the frameworks we are commonly given.