The Bloomsbury Companion to Holocaust Literature

Jenni Adams

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781474296311
• eBook ISBN: 9781472587442
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: Literature

The Bloomsbury Companion to Holocaust Literature is a comprehensive reference resource including a wealth of critical material on a diverse range of topics within the literary study of Holocaust writing. At its centre is a series of specially commissioned essays by leading scholars within the field: these address genre-specific issues such as the question of biographical and historical truth in Holocaust testimony, as well as broader topics including the politics of Holocaust representation and the validity of comparative approaches to the Holocaust in literature and criticism. The volume includes a substantial section detailing new and emergent trends within the literary study of the Holocaust, a concise glossary of major critical terminology, and an annotated bibliography of relevant research material. Featuring original essays by: Victoria Aarons, Jenni Adams, Michael Bernard-Donals, Matthew Boswell, Stef Craps, Richard Crownshaw, Brett Ashley Kaplan and Fernando Herrero-Matoses, Adrienne Kertzer, Erin McGlothlin, David Miller, and Sue Vice.

Current Research

1

A Genre of Rupture: The Literary Language of the Holocaust

Victoria Aarons

Abstract

Holocaust narrative, in drawing from two vital traditions of Jewish expression, midrash and lamentation, constitutes a genre of rupture that creates, extends and responds to the trauma of the Shoah. In doing so, Holocaust texts call upon literary and cultural traditions as a framework for the ongoing response to the devastation of the Holocaust, all the while creating within this responsive framework an interpretative reconfiguration of conventional forms of expression. Such narratives, this chapter argues, produce the effects of disequilibrium and estrangement that represent the enormity of the trauma of the Holocaust, inviting the reader to participate in an ethical act of reading and bearing witness. Such literary modes of representation create a language and a landscape of rupture, of discursive disequilibrium, and of narrative disjunction in an attempt to enact the very conditions they evoke. The convergence of historiography and literary invention in Holocaust writing lends itself to wide-ranging texts that call upon diverse discursive strategies and forms that engage in the strategic performance of rhetorical destabilization. From this subversive impulse, ‘a negative rhetoric emerges’, a rhetoric of unacceptability and opposition that resists closure and attempts to shape Jewish collective memory, linking personal and collective identities with traumatic history.

In Holocaust Representation: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics, Berel Lang argues that Holocaust literature is fashioned by a ‘blurring of traditional genres’ and that ‘this blurring effect reflects two principal sources – the character of the Holocaust as a subject for literary representation and the role of historical and ethical causality in shaping the genres, and thus the forms, of literary discourse’ (Lang, 2000, pp. 10, 35). This blurring of otherwise distinct genres and modes is a result of the failure of traditional forms and structures, as well as the perceived failure of ordinary language, to represent adequately the historical and ethical complexities of the Holocaust, to give voice to the felt experience of the Holocaust, ‘a crime so vast’, as Saul Bellow has put it, that it ‘brings all Being into Judgment’ (2010, p. 439). The enormity of what we have come to think of as the Holocaust – that time between 1933 and 1945, when Nazi Germany put into effect the annihilation of European Jewry – challenges conventional forms of expression and thus defies and reconfigures traditional telling, calling upon writers to seek alternative structures of representation to approximate and extend the scope of the Holocaust and its memory. What emerges through such representation is, to borrow a term from David Roskies, a ‘literature of destruction’, a literature that both calls upon traditional Jewish responsive and interpretative forms of expression and subverts traditional generic distinctions, paradoxically through which ‘one discovers the ultimate value of life’ (1989, p. 10). This challenge to received forms of representation makes rupture mimetic, and representation opens up tropically to the willed defiance of the unchangeable experience of trauma. That is, the experience of trauma is thematized by generic subversion in these texts.

Holocaust narratives draw from two vital traditions of Jewish expression as they mediate a post-Holocaust universe: midrash and lamentation. By midrash I refer to the traditional stories that extend themselves through retelling into the interpretative repertoire of Jewish writers, explanations of events and stories that bring them to life in the present, showing their persistent relevance and dramatizing their historical resonance (Aarons, 2005, pp. 40–1). Midrash in Holocaust narratives interpretatively fills in the gaps created by the silences of time and distance. Midrashic stories are openings for moments of continuity and amplification, an invitation to carry the weight of memory into the present. The tradition of midrash offers interpretative, even homiletic, extensions of biblical narratives; as such, it forms the basis of a specifically Jewish hermeneutics, one that extends itself as a methodological principle of interpretation in extending Jewish history and Jewish identity. Lamentation is the second tradition from which Holocaust narratives draw, originating in the Hebrew Book of Lamentations, the prophet Jeremiah’s mourning of the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE. In the Book of Lamentations, the prophet assumes the voice of the messenger and transmits memory in a speech act of elegiac reckoning and denunciation. As Roskies proposes, this paradigm ‘of destruction and desecration’, as the elegiac response to catastrophe, suggests twin archetypal patterns: ‘one as literal recall, the other as sacred parody’, where historical truth-telling and literary invention engage in the creation of a landscape infused with moral purpose (1984, p. 17). In evoking the two ancient topoi of lamentation and midrash, Holocaust texts simultaneously call upon literary and cultural traditions as a framework for the ongoing response to the devastation of the Holocaust, all the while creating within this responsive framework an interpretative reconfiguration of conventional forms of expression. As James Young suggests, such ancient archetypes are ‘invoked’ as much as they are ‘qualified’ and ‘recast’ (1988, p. 95). Successful Holocaust narratives typically qualify and reshape these archetypal modes of invention in two primary ways: (1) they fuse otherwise discrete genres; and (2) they refigure language and grammatical norms at the level of syntactical arrangement and word choice. These twin conceits of genre and lexicon produce the effects of rupture and estrangement that aim to represent the enormity of the trauma of the Holocaust. Midrash and lamentation function as general modes of perception and expression; they invite the reader into an act of understanding. Disruptions of genre and lexicon both represent and recreate the perceptions and interpretative gestures of midrashic understanding and of its accompanying moral lament.

Holocaust narratives committed to responsible representation create the conditions for discomfort and unease; they create a language and a landscape of rupture, of discursive disequilibrium and of narrative disjunction. To that end, Holocaust novels, memoirs, poems, fables and historical ‘imaginings’ that attempt, as Elie Wiesel once put it, to bring the reader ‘to the other side’, must enact the very conditions they evoke (1985, p. 13). Such texts thus engage in the strategic performance of rhetorical destabilization. From this subversive impulse, ‘a negative rhetoric emerges’, a rhetoric of unacceptability and opposition that resists closure, resists, that is, as Ehud Havazelet puts it in the Holocaust novel Bearing the Body, a ‘story’s consoling shape’ (Lang, 2000, p. 18; Havazelet, 2007, p. 132). Such writing creates moments of unease brought about by the subversive disjuncture of expectation and effect. We find this kind of disequilibrium, for example, in Tadeusz Borowski’s novella ‘This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen’ ([1959] 1976), whose very title disquietingly juxtaposes civility and barbarity. In this way, Holocaust narratives attempt to upend conventional constructs of language and experience, undoing some of language’s palliative, antidotal and redemptive possibilities. As Berel Lang proposes,

[T]he central question to ask in the analysis of Holocaust representation is just how the deepest and most urgent Holocaust art . . . has succeeded in turning an oppositional impulse into its own strength . . . . The pressures exerted . . . are such that the associations of the traditional forms – the developmental order of the novel, the predictability of prosody, the comforting representations of landscape or portrait in painting – are quite inadequate for the images of a subject with the moral dimensions and impersonal will of the Holocaust. Thus the constant turning in Holocaust images to difference: to the use of silence as means and metaphor, to obliqueness in representation . . ., to the uses of allegory and fable and surrealism, to the blurring of traditional genres not just for the sake of undoing them but in the interests of combining certain of their elements that otherwise had been held apart. (2000, pp. 9–10)

Thus writers such as Tadeusz Borowski, Jerzy Kosinski, Isiah Spiegal and, more recently, Cynthia Ozick turn to unconventional means in attempting to represent the Holocaust when traditional forms of literary expression show themselves to be inadequate to its moral enormity. This is not to say that a subject as complex as the Holocaust cannot be known, only that such knowledge requires revised and sometimes extreme modes of representation in its conscientious transmission. As the late Israeli psychologist Dan Bar-On asks, ‘How can one “translate” such experiences into ordinary language?’ (1998, p. 94). Such a ‘translation’ is achieved by defamiliarizing language, by making it appear extraordinary, and by refashioning it to rent the fabric of narrative or formal continuity in a conscious break from convention.

Because of the inherent limitations of conventional forms and genres in representing catastrophe, Holocaust narratives draw literary license from dissociation and from various strategies of representational subterfuge, thus effecting in their juncture a ‘blurring’ of genres to open up the possibilities of interpretation. ‘Blurring’ is a curious metaphor here. Rather than obscuring or making indistinct its subject, the subversion of convention and its accompanying disruption create a striking clarity in calling forth the experience of rupture. Such strategies of disruption characterize first-hand accounts by Holocaust survivors, those accounts by Elie Wiesel, Ida Fink and Primo Levi, for example. These writers, to borrow the title of one of Wiesel’s (2005) novels, testify to ‘the time of the uprooted’, having been hidden in forests, incarcerated in ghettoes, deported to concentration camps, subjected to death marches. Survivor writing extends beyond direct testimony into the self-consciously strategic revisions of genre and mode. Wiesel’s novel Night ([1958] 2006) takes its reader through the historical stages of round-up, deportation, incarceration, annihilation and liberation, all the while contextualizing and interpreting those events in the related genres of autobiography, testimony and memoir, all of which merge personal history with meditations on collective significance.

We find a similar generically apposite attempt at the disruption of conventional representation in Primo Levi’s turning of the traditional life-affirming prayer of the ‘Shema’ into a poem about the brutal denial of humanity. Through a harsh syllabic intonation of verse that undercuts the soothing cadences of the lines of the ancient prayer, Levi’s poem reinterprets the Shema’s reassuring promise of the endurance of the covenant as a receding silhouette by extending the poem into a post-Holocaust present. The poem thus shows the Holocaust as a fundamental deracination of the origins and possibility of Jewish life. The foreboding poetic voice asks us to

Consider if this is a man

Who works in the mud

Who does not know peace

Who fights for a scrap of bread

Who dies because of a yes or a no.

Consider if this is a woman,

Without hair and without name

With no more strength to remember,

Her eyes empty and her womb cold

Like a frog in winter. (Levi, [1958] 1996, p. 11)

Levi’s ‘revision’ of this biblical text constitutes a midrashic response to the Holocaust’s distortion of the basic tenets of a humane world. Levi turns this traditional representation of the endurance of the covenant into its distorted, morbid other. An affirmation of life is modified to become a meditation on death.

Ida Fink’s short story, ‘The Key Game’, is another example of the way Holocaust writing refigures conventional representation to take the reader to the place of traumatic origin. The brief story, which takes place in a family kitchen, takes assumptions about domesticity and child’s play and transforms them into games of horror. In the story, the survival of a Jewish family depends on a 3-year-old child’s constant rehearsal of a theatrical performance in which he would pronounce his father dead to the soldiers who will inevitably arrive at their door to execute his fate. The juxtaposition of the mother’s melodic mimetic simulation of the doorbell’s chimes – ‘Ding-dong . . . a soft, lovely bell . . . the sound of chimes ringing so musically from his mother’s lips’ – and the child’s ragged, repetitive, deafening pretense of noisily searching for the door key in a futile attempt to afford his father time to conceal himself in a crevasse in the wall creates the anxious conditions of heightened fear, a prelude to ruin (Fink, [1987] 1995b, p. 36). The child never gets it right in the story; there is never enough time for the father to hide. The implication is that history has already prevented the father’s escape. This story works by implication, with sparse dialogue and a simple, repetitive event, creating anticipation of collective devastation through the collectivizing anonymity of Fink’s characters. Fink’s story thus re-enacts traumatic rupture and re-engages the point of its origin, all the while creating in the reader an anxiety of retrospective anticipation, an extreme form of dramatic irony. This vagueness of personalized narrative detail – names, place, time and ethnicity – creates an effect of foreboding through crafted indirection. What is left unsaid evokes precisely what the reader knows to be true, that the Nazis will arrest the father and seize the mother and child. In this way Fink refigures conventional modes of narrative to achieve an effect of personal and collective disruption and catastrophe.

In these examples, strategic disjunctions are deployed as moments of dislocation within some form of narrative or cultural continuity. In Wiesel’s Night, the continuity that forms the context of disruption is historical. In Levi’s ‘Shema’, the continuity is biblical. In Fink’s ‘The Key Game’, the continuity is domestic. In all three cases, the associative stability of the familiar is dislocated by the dissociative effect of its narrative and linguistic rupture. The most immediate and provocative Holocaust narratives – poems, stories, novels and imaginative memoirs – attempt to evoke the Holocaust by aligning their modes of representation with historical rupture and trauma. Such ‘negative’ rhetorical strategies, set in disjunction to the familiar and the consoling, are characteristic not only of survivor writing, but also of the literature of ‘second-hand’ witnesses, narratives by those who did not experience the events of the Holocaust directly, but who write from a more distanced perspective, a perspective of memory transferred, memory, as Lisa Appignanesi, in her memoir Losing the Dead, puts it, that ‘cascades through the generations’ (2000, p. 8). Holocaust memory and the representation of trauma extend beyond the authorizing source of direct experience. Thus the imagined narratives of post-Holocaust generations, as Alan Berger suggests, ‘bear the indelible imprint of the Shoah’s cultural, psychic, and theological legacy’ (1997, p. 18). At the same time, post-Holocaust generations write as spectators to a history and memory not their own, a memory bequeathed to them with heavy responsibility, both theirs as Jews and not theirs because historically removed. To this end, Marianne Hirsch, in Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory, provocatively distinguishes memory from ‘postmemory’:

Postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation. This is not to say that memory itself is unmediated, but that it is more directly connected to the past. (1997, p. 22)

Thus the literary representation of the Holocaust extends beyond survivor testimony. The work of those following generations is part of an ongoing evolution of bearing witness, not only to genocide, but to the survival of its memory and of the cultural life it tried to eradicate. And although post-Holocaust writers, as Henri Raczymow proposes, write from a memory ‘shot through with holes’, imperfect and fragmentary, these writers are motivated by ‘the feeling all of [them] have, deep down, of having missed a train’ (1994, p. 105). In other words, the act of representation becomes an attempt to mediate and extend an experience complex and temporally and experientially removed.

Thus, the convergence of historiography and literary invention in Holocaust writing lends itself to wide-ranging texts that call upon diverse discursive strategies. Such works attempt to shape Jewish collective memory, linking personal and collective identities with traumatic history. Throughout the varied corpus of Holocaust literature, we find works that, through the imaginative reconfigurations that engage the Holocaust as a subject of testimony and moral reckoning, attempt to create a particularity of expression to represent the trauma of dispossession. While imaginative investment and a sense of moral purpose are the means by which these writers engage the Holocaust, their work is no less permeated with an abiding sense of the importance of getting history right, of not misrepresenting the known facts of history and of testimony. On the one hand, the Holocaust requires a morally engaged response; on the other, the challenges of historical representation make imaginative reconstruction of experience problematic. For example, second-generation Holocaust writer Art Spiegelman, in the graphic novel MAUS (1986), will use the genre of the ‘comic book’ to merge autobiography, biography and history, the conventions of the adopted form defamiliarizing the received weight of each genre in representing the complexity of his family’s experience. For this reason, modes of representation become crucial in accounting both for moral conviction and unsettling historical complexity.

The nature of the Holocaust challenges language, just as language attempts to comprehend its history. The character of the Holocaust – its unprecedented, legislated, barbaric pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Traces, Dis/Continuities, Complicities: An Introduction to Holocaust Literature
• Current Research
• 2 Questions of Truth in Holocaust Memory and Testimony
• 3 After Epic: Adorno’s Scream and the Shadows of Lyric
• 4 Relationships to Realism in Post-Holocaust Fiction: Conflicted Realism and the Counterfactual Historical Nove
• 5 Theory and the Ethics of Holocaust Representation
• 6 ‘Don’t You Know Anything?’: Childhood and the Holocaust
• 7 Holocaust Postmemory: W. G. Sebald and Gerhard Richter
• 8 Narrative Perspective and the Holocaust Perpetrator: Edgar Hilsenrath’s The Nazi and the Barber and Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones
• 9 Holocaust Literature and the Taboo
• 10 Holocaust Literature: Comparative Perspectives
• 11 Depoliticizing and Repoliticizing Holocaust Memory
• New Directions in Holocaust Literary Studies
• Annotated Bibliography
• Glossary of Major Terms and Concepts
• Index