AT A DISTANCE OF YEARS: THE NOVEL OF AGING IN THE SHADOW OF AUSCHWITZ by Anthony C. Wexler A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland January 2015 © 2015 Anthony C. Wexler All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT “At a Distance of Years: The Novel of Aging in the Shadow of Auschwitz” considers a group of Vollendungsromane, or novels of old age, written at the end of the twentieth century that all depict the subjective experience of old age so as to reckon with a larger historical development: the end of the “era of witnessing” connected to the aging and death of the community of Holocaust survivors. Contrary to depictions of late life that focus exclusively on the personal or universal aspects of the aging process, the works considered in this study reflect on, and respond to, the ways in which the memory of traumatic events begins to erode or become distorted with the passage of time. In works that disrupt the Vollendungsroman genre, Primo Levi, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and J.M. Coetzee chronicle the exhaustion of testimonial authority in contemporary Holocaust discourse. These post-Holocaust Vollendungsromane, with their marked entwinement of personal and historical categories of experience, anticipate and resist the Holocaust’s fading from memory. At the same time, they self-consciously posit literature’s unique advantages in combatting the potential obsolescence of testimony. While the genre of the Vollendungsroman has not displaced the Bildungsroman in the postwar period, it has proven to be uniquely suited to writers at the end of the twentieth century struggling to make sense of what traumatic events like the Holocaust can and should mean in a world without witnesses. Directors: Eric Sundquist and Simon During ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A number of people contributed to this project. Simon During gave me the time and the space to figure out what I was talking about, while Eric Sundquist guided me through the final years and helped me to believe that it was a project worth finishing. I am grateful to both of them. DeWayne Dean and Robert Day read and edited numerous drafts at various stages. Their contributions made this project significantly better than it would have been otherwise. A timely fellowship from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum gave me the chance to discuss the project with scholars working on related projects and the time I needed to complete the final chapters. Pat Kain and Will Evans have been continuously supportive, and my time in their Expository Writing Program has been invaluable. I want to thank my friends over the years that had the good sense not to ask me about the dissertation, as well as those who helped me to think more clearly about the topic. A special thank you to my first friend at Johns Hopkins, Andrew Sisson, and to Robert Day, DeWayne Dean, George Oppel, and Robert Higney. And to my old friends – Andrew Lindy, Scott Sternthal and Adrian Burhop – whose humor would be hard to live without. I also want to thank my family for never asking me why I wasn’t doing something else. Without my brother’s friendship and the support of my parents, writing this dissertation would have been a lonelier and less rewarding experience. And finally, I want to dedicate the dissertation to Jenny Jochens and the late John Baldwin whose hospitality and encouragement made it possible for me to complete this project. iii I feel the passage of years, of my years too. And as they pass, I can feel a slippage in the way these memories are understood in the world. – Primo Levi iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: At a Distance of Years…………………………………………………….1 Chapter One: Primo Levi and the Problem of Age……………………………………………………32 Chapter Two: From Anne Frank to Primo Levi: Philip Roth’s Aging Holocaust…………..……….....67 Chapter Three: “The End of The Line”: The Life Review and Holocaust Memory in Saul Bellow’s The Bellarosa Connection………………………………………………………………......108 Chapter Four: “No Country for Old Men”: Old Age and the Holocaust in J.M Coetzee’s Disgrace………………………………………………………………………………..157 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………….....190 v INTRODUCTION “At a Distance of Years” It is true that if an old man is dealt with in his subjective aspect he is not a good hero for a novel; he is finished, set, with no hope, no development to be looked for; as far as he is concerned it is all over and death already dwells within, so that nothing that can happen to him is of any importance. – Simone de Beauvoir1 Holocaust survivors will have to face the facts: as they grow weaker with age, Auschwitz is slipping out of their hands. – Imre Kertész2 This study focuses on a group of Vollendungsromane, or novels of old age, written at the end of the twentieth century that depict the subjective experience of old age and deploy late style so as to reckon with a specific historical reality: the end of the “era of witnessing” connected to the aging and death of the community of Holocaust survivors.3 The depictions of late life in these works tend to fixate on experiences that occasion not only greater insight about the historical and biographical past, but also a keener 1 Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age, trans. Patrick O’Brian (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1972), 210. 2 Imre Kertész, “Who Owns Auschwitz?” trans. John MacKay, in The Yale Journal of Criticism 14.1 (2001), 267. 3 Over the course of this study, I use “old age” and “late life” interchangeably. The terms refer to the final years of a long life when the organism experiences inevitable and irreversible deterioration and decline on account of its age. This definition, which echoes Helen Small’s account in The Long Life, applies to all the central characters considered in this study. By making old age, endings, and lateness the substance of these works, these writers not only take on the phenomenological experience of agedness, but also do so in ways that variously engage with the “discourse of lateness” in the literary field: a discourse that yokes stylistic changes to an artist’s personal development from youth to maturity. Over the last decade a growing number of critics and scholars have discussed the interface between old age and late style in full-length monographs. See, for example Helen Small, The Long Life (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007); Gordon McMullan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007); and Edward Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (New York: Vintage, 2007). 1 understanding of late-life and historical temporality itself. The post-Holocaust Vollendungsromane considered in this study dramatize what Robert Butler (the founder of gerontology in America) calls the “life review,” only to discover that characters’ aging makes them unequal to the task of sustaining historical memory of the Holocaust’s epochal trauma. Writers and characters find that their own memories, and the testimony they might offer or have offered in the past, are devolving, rather than culminating in late-life wisdom. I argue that these works, which range from Primo Levi’s last work, to novels by Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and J.M. Coetzee, approach the fading of the Holocaust from memory – a fading associated with aging and death of generation of those who lived through the war – in terms that seek to preempt and mitigate that fading. The varying balances they strike, between holding on and letting go of the memory of oppression, are the subject of this study. In both their content and their use of late style, these works form a counter- tradition to the Bildungsroman. In The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, Franco Moretti points to the Bildungsroman as the “symbolic form of modernity” where the experience of youth most closely resembles the restless and future oriented experience of modernity. The Bildungsroman, says Moretti, abstracts from “real youth a symbolic one, epitomized…in mobility and interiority” (5), providing a crucible in which writers can represent a more general condition. Youth is chosen as the “new epochs’ specific material sign…Youth is…modernity’s ‘essence’, the sign of a world that seeks its meaning in the future rather than in the past” (5). If youth offers a way of understanding modernity, old age at the end of the twentieth century speaks to an increasing concern not with the future, but with the past. The post-Holocaust 2 Vollendungsoman is driven by the imperative to review the century, and the traumatic events that defined it, from the “high world view of those who have lived long and seen it all” (Arnheim 150). The diminishing authority of long life, however, is the exact difficulty that these works seek to think through. Since these works take the last phase of life as their starting point, they tend to focus on the same themes of interest to gerontologists: the arduous tasks of disengagement; the integrative work of the life review; coping with societal changes; intergenerational friction; feelings of anachronism and obsolescence; the loss of friends and family members; memory loss; physical decline; and stereotypical diminishment and marginalization. These themes have played an important role within the work of contemporary writers such as: Kingsley Amis (Ending Up), Vita Sackville-West (All Passion Spent), Margret Laurence (The Stone Angel) Dorris Lessing (“An old woman and her cat,” The Diaries of Jane Somers), and Iris Murdoch (The Sea, The Sea) among others. The aging characters in these works seek “some kind of affirmation in the face of loss,” some form of compensation for the changes brought on by age (248).4 And these writers tend to present late life as a period in the life cycle when the inevitable losses associated with age are compensated by the acquisition of knowledge, virtue, or new forms of connection.5 Indeed, the penchant for progress, which is the hallmark of the Bildungsroman, returns in somewhat muted form through the compensations associated with late life in a number of contemporary Vollendungsromane.