chapter 6 Post-Postmodern “Entertainment” The Holocaust and Renewalism in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Everything Is Illuminated, The History of Love, and Great House

Though to proclaim the end of postmodernism may itself be a characteristi- cally postmodern gesture, it is certainly the case that in recent years the limita- tions of the postmodern paradigm have clearly come into focus.1 It is broadly perceived today that postmodernism effectively leads to a certain epistemo- logical as well as moral impasse, a kind of void where anything goes but noth- ing makes sense. Consequently, the challenge for a great many contemporary artists and thinkers is to renew the possibilities, precisely, of making sense again in ways that steer clear of postmodernism’s seemingly all-consuming, radically deconstructive impulses, but without falling back upon the founda- tionalist certainties of earlier paradigms. In short, such efforts must avoid the ultimately dogmatic and teleological thinking which characterizes both post- modernism as well as what preceded it—that is, the type of thinking that promises definitive answers. According to Josh Toth, however, such efforts are in principle bound to fail, because the call to “respect the specter [of teleol- ogy],” as he characterizes the challenge to move beyond postmodernism’s leg- acy, already represents a new teleological imperative: something that must be done. Ironically, however, Toth also points out that in the field of literature these emerging renewalist impulses appear to be characterized precisely by not bothering too much about matters of principle. Indeed, Toth suggests that “the literature of renewalism can be defined as an attempt to relax the rules.”2 A certain willingness to “relax the rules” is also what marks the Holocaust- inflected writings of Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Nicole Krauss in various ways.3 These writers impiously challenge and subvert the traditional

1 The idea that to proclaim the end of postmodernism is in itself a characteristically postmod- ern gesture is presented in various ways by Herbert de Vriese in “Is er Leven na de Doodverklaring? Over het Postmodernisme van de Tweede Generatie,” in Het Postmodernisme Voorbij, ed. Loes Derksen, Edwin Koster, and Jan van der Stoep (Amsterdam: vu University Press, 2008), 37–53. 2 Josh Toth, The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2010), 89, 123. Italics in original. 3 The “post-postmodern” or renewalist tendencies that I am concerned with in this chapter may be identified in the work of all four Jewish American authors central to this study. But I feel their presence is more pronounced in the writing of Chabon, Foer, and Kraus than in

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004316072_008 182 chapter 6 orthodoxies surrounding the (literary) representation of the Holocaust, while at the same time allowing themselves great imaginative liberties in engaging with matters of Jewish identity and history more generally. To them, the Holocaust and Jewishness are clearly neither sacred nor immutable; their significance is rather constantly reasserted and discursively reconstructed, in ways inevitably affected by the concerns of the present. This approach clearly bespeaks a thor- oughly postmodern sensibility, yet it lacks the sense of irresponsible detachment and relativism that is increasingly associated with postmodernism. Indeed, these authors’ impieties do not belittle or berate either the memory of the Holocaust or Jewish history and culture. Quite the contrary, it is precisely their unorthodox and impious treatments of these themes that serve to rejuvenate and renew their significance in a twenty-first century us context. Thus, their “relaxing the rules” is not so much a sign of a putatively “postmodern” detachment and relativ- ism, but rather of a renewed sense of commitment to reestablish possibilities of (moral) signification in the wake of postmodernism. Indeed, Chabon, Foer, and Krauss’s ways of “relaxing the rules” appear closely related to the contemporary renewalist efforts that Toth is concerned with. It is striking, moreover, that these authors’ efforts to relax the rules con- cerning the representation of the Holocaust as well as Jewish identity and his- tory coincide with—and, as I will argue further on, are in fact predicated on—a very hopeful and characteristically renewalist restoration of faith in the power of literature. In fact, this was already explored to some degree in earlier discus- sions; in Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, for example, Joe Kavalier finds in comic books an enormously powerful means of “escape” from the horrors of history through which he ultimately learns to deal with them. In Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love, moreover, isolated characters and lives ruined by the Holocaust are brought to a sense of meaningful communion despite time and distance, and, significantly, through the unlikely survival of a fiction. And in Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated and Chabon’s The Yiddish Police­ men’s Union, it is through patently fictional means that these authors are able to resurrect something of their Yiddish and Eastern European Jewish heritage that was lost in the Holocaust. Additionally, in interviews and essays these authors each tend to emphasize that literature, whatever its abilities to sub- vert, is first and foremost an ethical and moral discourse. Or more precisely, they each embrace literature as a medium that facilitates a form of meaningful communication that is able to imaginatively connect people in ways not to be had elsewhere.

that of Nathan Englander. For that reason, in the present chapter I will focus on the former three and will not discuss Englander’s work.