Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Narratives: Towards a Theory of Transgenerational Empathy

Submitted by Lewis Ward to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English, September 2008.

This thesis is available for library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgment.

I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University.

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Abstract

What is the relationship between writing in the present and the traumatic historical events that form the subject of that writing? What narrative strategies do authors employ in order to negotiate the ethical and epistemological problems raised by this gap in time and experience?

“Trauma theory” is undermined by clinical controversies and contradictory claims for “literal truth” and “incomprehensibility”. Similarly, the Holocaust has been considered inherently unrepresentable unless by those who witnessed it, leading to a false opposition between genres of “testimony” and “fiction”. A way out of these dead ends is to consider the role of the first-person narrator in contemporary Holocaust narratives. While use of this device risks an inappropriate level of identification with those whose experience is both extreme and unknowable, I argue that this problem may be resolved to an extent through “transgenerational empathy”, an approach to the past that is self- reflexive, incorporates ideas of time, memory and generations, and moves both towards and away from the victims of the past in a simultaneous gesture of proximity and distance. For this theory I draw on Dominick LaCapra’s definitions of empathy and “empathic unsettlement”, and on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s concept of the “fusion of horizons” between past and present.

Transgenerational empathy involves giving equal weight to “memory” and “history”. An over-emphasis on memory leads to narratives that are merely identificatory, such as Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces and Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments. In contrast, W. G. Sebald’s use of a narrative persona in The Emigrants and Austerlitz enables transgenerational empathy in narrative by simultaneously imposing layers of distance while establishing close personal connection. Similarly, Jonathan Safran Foer’s third- generation aesthetic of “post-postmemory” in Everything is Illuminated uses a “dual persona” device to foreground empathically the abyss at the heart of any attempt to recapture the past. My analysis of these authors draws on the writings of Gillian Rose, Paul Ricoeur, Marianne Hirsch and Jacques Derrida. However, the concept of “transgenerational empathy” would benefit from further research, both in terms of its “temporal dimension” and the use of narrative personae by other contemporary authors such as Philip Roth. 3

Table of Contents

Abstract ..2 Table of Contents ..3 Acknowledgements ..4

Introduction: Holocaust memory and the ethics of representation ..5

1 Moving beyond notions of literal truth and the belated sublime: the historical, political and clinical controversies of trauma ..31

2 Resolving the problems of identification: LaCapra, Gadamer, self- reflexivity and transgenerational empathy ..58

3 The consequences of promoting memory over history: identification and deception in Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces and Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments ..82

4 A simultaneous gesture of proximity and distance: the empathic narrative persona in W. G. Sebald’s “Paul Bereyter” and Austerlitz ..117

5 “An act of replacement”: duality, post-postmemory and absence in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated ..149

Conclusion: the future of transgenerational empathy ..174

Works cited ..178 4

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to thank my inspirational and supportive supervisor, Anthony Fothergill, and my kind yet rigorous examiners, Dr Philip Schwyzer and Professor Sue Vice. The Department of English at Exeter provided both financial assistance and a deep well of advice and encouragement; I am particularly grateful to Dr Ana Vadillo, Professor Rick Rylance, Professor Regenia Gagnier, Dr Dan North, Dr Jo Gill and Professor Helen Taylor. I am also indebted to Dr Shani Rousso, Roger Pitt, Alice Barnaby and Simon Whalley for their comments on work in progress, and to Lesley Williams and Dr Ali Judd for proof reading at such short notice. My parents, Andy and Gwyneth Ward, provided vital support (yet again), which I hope one day to repay. Finally, I extend my profound gratitude to Liz Jones for her tireless listening, forensic close reading and unflinching belief. 5

Introduction: Holocaust memory and the ethics of representation

It is now over sixty years since the end of World War II. Yet prose narratives (not to mention other art-forms) continue to address the traumatic events of the middle of the twentieth century. Within this literature, a sub-genre of “contemporary Holocaust narratives” may be provisionally identified. Texts in this group often acknowledge their temporal and generational distance from the event by thematizing memory in a self- reflexive manner. Indeed, the subject of these narratives is often not so much the Holocaust itself, but the tension inherent in the act of “remembering” an event so far from the writer’s experience which nevertheless provokes a powerful feeling of proximity in the form of emotional response to the suffering of victims.

Thinking about this situation of contemporary literature generates several questions. What is the relationship between writing in the present and the traumatic historical events that form the subject of that writing? How is this gap in time and experience negotiated in narratives that deal with events from previous generations? What strategies do authors employ in these situations, and by what imperatives are they guided?

The work on trauma and testimony that emerged in the United States in the 1990s provides a starting point for answering these questions. For example, the model in which the victim of a traumatic event testifies in the presence of a listener or therapist might be considered suggestive for narrative (as Felman and Laub argue in their landmark publication Testimony: Crises in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History [1992]). However, this approach raises two central problems. First, the listener in this situation risks over-identification with the other, which may lead to development of a secondary trauma, and a consequent loss of critical judgement. Second, inherent to the process is a controversial presumption that healing or redemption is the likely or desirable result of talking and remembering. If an analogy is made between this listener and an author who chooses to write about traumatic events that he or she did not endure or witness, the problems of over-identification and healing would appear to be endemic to Holocaust literature. 6

Despite this connection, however, it is not clear that the application of trauma theory to narrative will adequately answer the questions set out above. In Chapter 1 of this study I investigate trauma in terms both of its material history and its history as a concept. Though highly suggestive, the tenets of trauma theory are nevertheless undermined by their reliance on certain ideas of memory based on apparently observable phenomena. I argue that these notions, which include “belatedness” and a belief in the “literal” truth of traumatic recall, are inappropriate tools for evaluating contemporary Holocaust narratives. Moreover, trauma theory is both politically determined and clinically controversial. This is not to say that it cannot generate useful formal analysis of contemporary writing, with Anne Whitehead’s Trauma Fiction (2004) being the exemplar in this regard. However, I seek to build on this work and ask whether another model might be more helpful in understanding the relationship of writing in the present to the traumatic events of the past. In Chapter 2 I propose to activate for literary study the historian Dominick LaCapra’s notions of empathy and empathic unsettlement, which connote acknowledgement of one’s affective response to the suffering of history’s victims while retaining a level of objectivity that preserves the alterity of the other. I analyse this in relation to identification, which as Robert Eaglestone and others have pointed out is a central problem of the discourses of trauma and the Holocaust. With reference to Gadamer’s notion of the “fusion of horizons”, I propose that LaCaprian empathy in prose narrative can be usefully defined as a simultaneous gesture of proximity and distance. I add the term “transgenerational” to empathy to indicate the dimensions of time and memory that are typically foregrounded in narratives by later generations.

A further dimension to the debate, and one which corresponds to an extent with the model of proximity and distance, is the vexed relation between memory and history. In Chapter 3, I situate Binjamin Wilkomirski’s false memoir Fragments (1995) and Anne Michaels’ poetic novel Fugitive Pieces (1996) in the context of the memory/history debate that has permeated critical discourse in the humanities since the 1980s. I argue that Wilkomirski and Michaels’ texts over-privilege memory to the extent that they merely identify rather than empathize with the Holocaust victims they depict. For this analysis I broadly align memory with affect, identification and proximity, and history with intellect, objectivity and distance, to demonstrate again that these false oppositions 7 should be broken down to enable an empathic gesture that acknowledges the value of both.

In Chapter 4 I argue that such a gesture is achieved in exemplary fashion in the work of W. G. Sebald, with particular reference to the “Paul Bereyter” section of The Emigrants (1993) and the longer narrative Austerlitz (2001). These generically hybrid prose works take an oblique approach to the Holocaust through themes of exile, memory and loss. My focus is on Sebald’s unusual use of a narrator who has some biographical correspondence with the author and who takes part in the action, a figure I define as the “empathic narrative persona”. This device is crucial to what I argue is Sebald’s project of self-reflexively foregrounding the process of LaCaprian empathy, in which he simultaneously imposes layers of narrative distance while establishing close personal connection with his damaged protagonists. The analysis in this chapter will further clarify the particular meaning of empathy being used in the present study. In the Sebaldian narrator’s case, it consists of a refusal to “imagine” or “picture” the suffering of others, while nevertheless “working through” the inevitable affective emotions raised by our knowledge of them, in a consistent and convincing rejection of identification. This conclusion is reached with the help of the analysis by Sebald scholars Anne Fuchs and J. J. Long, in particular their emphasis on the writer’s self-reflexive technique, and through the critique of Holocaust representation advanced by the philosopher Gillian Rose in Mourning Becomes the Law (1996).

In Chapter 5 I turn to the very different approach to the Holocaust taken by Jonathan Safran Foer in Everything is Illuminated (2002). This experimental and semi- autobiographical novel addresses themes of generational memory, family secrets, and the ethical relation of the present to the past, through a combination of travel narrative, epistolary interludes and magical realism. Foer himself has called his novel less an “act of creation” than an “act of replacement”. In this chapter I evaluate how far this act constitutes an empathic relation to the past. I consider several contextual elements, including contemporary Holocaust debates in the United States (Foer’s country of origin), and the “Yizkor” books of Jewish remembrance that serve as a contrast with Foer’s re-imagining of history. I also investigate the relevance to my thesis of Marianne Hirsch’s notion of “postmemory”, first described in Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (1997), and of Paul Ricoeur’s theory of historical fiction, as 8 put forward in Time and Narrative (1988). Finally, I consider Jacques Derrida’s insight that presence is always deferred in an “infinite chain” of “supplements”. Using these contextual and theoretical models, I argue that Foer’s novel self-reflexively foregrounds the problems of memory through its narrative structure. While a version of the author enters the novel in person, establishing a deeply felt bloodline connection to his ancestors, his failed quest is narrated by another, thus providing objective distance through trenchant criticisms. This “dual persona” device forms a chain of Derridean supplements or “replacements” that gestures to the inevitable absence at the heart of any attempt to recapture the past. Foer’s third-generation aesthetic of “post-postmemory” thus achieves a degree of empathy by revealing the abyss at the heart of any attempt at transgenerational identification.

Finally, in a brief conclusion I suggest some possible avenues of further research into the question of transgenerational empathy. I introduce the topic of what might be termed the “temporal dimension” to the gesture of proximity and distance. I also suggest Philip Roth as another author who both makes use of personae in narrative and addresses the traumatic past, particularly in his novel The Plot Against America (2004). Roth, unlike Sebald and Foer, was alive during World War II, and therefore occupies an interesting position of geographical distance and personal memory which could be used to broaden the scope of my concept of transgenerational empathy in narrative.

In the remainder of this Introduction I provide context for the thesis outlined above. First I discuss the ethical and epistemological debates surrounding Holocaust representation. Secondly, I evaluate other recent approaches to my topic and show how my thesis adds to these contributions. Finally, I define the parameters of “contemporary Holocaust narratives” with reference to the history of literature on the subject, other attempts to organize the field, and further examples of recent prose narratives not discussed in the main body of the thesis.

I begin, however, with an example from outside the category of Holocaust literature. Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement (2001) deals with other historical events of that time: the British retreat to (and from) Dunkirk in 1940, and the subsequent overwhelming numbers of wounded arriving in English hospitals. McEwan drew on two major sources: the tales told by his father, a former soldier who made the journey from 9 wartime France to hospital bed in Liverpool; and the written memoir of novelist and wartime nurse Lucilla Andrews, No Time for Romance (1977). When Andrews died in 2006, an article by Julia Langdon in the Mail on Sunday accused McEwan of profiting from the memoir without due tribute to its author. Plagiarism could not be explicitly alleged, as McEwan had acknowledged the source at the end of his novel. However, it was implied in the title of the Mail’s piece, “Revealed: how Booker prize writer copied work of the queen of hospital romance”, and in a “spot the difference” section showing similar extracts from the two works. After several notable writers rallied to McEwan’s cause, pointing out that all historical novels rely on factual material, Langdon retreated, saying that she had only accused McEwan of lacking “simple courtesy and professional etiquette” (48). The affair soon subsided.

However, the events were revisited in Critical Quarterly the following summer. In his Foreword to “The McEwan Dossier”, Colin McCabe reflected on the implications of such accusations of plagiarism:

McEwan’s novel raises the question of the writer’s relation to ‘borrowed words’ in a particularly acute fashion because it is explicitly a historical novel set before the writer was born. Borrowing here does not simply involve the inevitable traces left by others’ writing and speech, but the necessity for the writer to anchor his or her narrative in the specificities of an age unknown at first hand. (32)

While this “necessity” is arguable, it seems appropriate in this case, given McEwan’s own response to Langdon’s initial article. Writing in The Guardian (and reprinted in Critical Quarterly), McEwan explains that Andrews’ memoir is, to his knowledge, the only written eye-witness account available on the subject of nurses’ experience during the influx of Dunkirk veterans in 1940. He argues that such events “demand the strictest factual accuracy. When all these elements are 60 years in the past, the quest for truth becomes all the more difficult and important” (qtd. in McCabe 47-8). Beyond veracity, however, McEwan also makes assertions about the ethical responsibility of writing and the nature of this “truth”:

It is an eerie, intrusive matter, inserting imaginary characters into actual historical events. A certain freedom is suddenly compromised; as one crosses and re-crosses the lines between fantasy and the historical record, one feels a weighty obligation to strict accuracy. In writing about wartime especially, it 10

seems like a form of respect for the suffering of a generation wrenched from their ordinary lives to be conscripted into a nightmare.

The writer of a historical novel may resent his dependence on the written record, on memoirs and eyewitness accounts, in other words on other writers, but there is no escape: Dunkirk or a wartime hospital can be novelistically realised, but they cannot be re-invented. (46-7)

This idea of an inherent constraint to the process of writing is echoed by the novelist Sarah Waters. Waters compares McEwan’s situation to her own experience writing The Night Watch (2006), which is set in London during World War II bombing, arguing that “there is a natural limit to the ways in which one can describe, say, an air raid, or driving an ambulance through the Blitz, or queuing for rationed food” (qtd. in McCabe 58). Waters acknowledges that such scruples did not arise when writing her other novels, which are set in the nineteenth century. Similarly, McEwan does not hesitate to create the thoughts of a thirteen-year-old girl in pre-war England – the subject of the first part of Atonement - though such experience is just as far from his own as that of a soldier or nurse. Of course, a large part of this distinction is about reverence for facts; Dunkirk and the Blitz are real historical events, and therefore, McEwan writes, “cannot be re-invented”. But the views of McEwan and Waters also reveal an underlying ethics of representation in which events involving traumatic experiences carry a particular moral weight. McEwan’s desire to show “respect for the suffering of a generation” means that he refuses to try to imagine what it was like, instead only consenting to write about such events if he has eye-witness accounts on which to draw. Another important example is Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy (1991-5), which similarly draws on the author’s careful research of first-hand testimonial accounts in its fictionalization of shell shock victims in World War I.

This dimension of personal ethics is an important component of the problem of Holocaust representation. The debate over whether such representation is desirable, permissible, or even possible is usually traced back to Theodor Adorno’s pronouncement in 1951 that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (“Cultural Criticism” 34). Though Adorno later modified his stance, at least as far as survivor- poets were concerned, conceding that “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream” (“Meditations” 362), the suspicion of art in the face of the Holocaust has continued. George Steiner, for example, wrote in 1966 11 that the only response to the dilemma should be a conscious, deliberate silence: “It is better for the poet to mutilate his own tongue than to dignify the inhuman either with his gift or his uncaring” (“Silence” 73).

Of course, such pronouncements have had little effect on the amount of Holocaust literature produced. Lawrence Langer’s The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (1975) brought together and illuminated the many novels on the subject that had by then appeared, convincingly arguing for the crucial role of fiction in making the Holocaust comprehensible for the human imagination. For Langer, the novel form’s inherent blend of fact and fantasy, what he calls its “irrealism” (45), is exactly appropriate for depicting events that are often scarcely believable. This argument is in direct opposition to the idea that the Holocaust is intrinsically resistant to fictional representation, a view put forward by, for example, the philosopher Berel Lang in Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (1990). For Lang, the problem stems from the perceived nature of the events:

On the account given, imaginative representation would personalize even events that are impersonal and corporate; it would dehistoricize and generalize events that occur specifically and contingently. And the unavoidable dissonance here is evident. [. . .] where impersonality and abstractness are essential features of the subject, as in the subject of the Nazi genocide, then a literary focus on individuation and agency ‘contradicts’ the subject itself [. . .]. (144-5)

Lang’s argument rests on a distinction between “figurative” and “historical” discourse. He says that the writer of figurative discourse, in addition to emphasising the individual agency of characters, inevitably “obtrudes” (145) into the narrative, giving his or her own perspective, thereby implying that alternative perspectives are also possible. This is unacceptable to Lang because in the case of the Holocaust there must be a limit to the possible range of viewpoints:

The figurative assertion of alternative possibilities, in other words, suggests a denial of limitation: no possibilities are excluded. And although for some literary subjects openness of this sort may be warranted or even desirable, for others it represents a falsification, morally and conceptually. (145-6, emphasis in original)

This focus on the ethical limits of representation (reminiscent of Sarah Waters’ assertion that “there is a natural limit to the ways one can describe”) is connected to the view that 12 the Holocaust is itself a “limit event”, that is, one that stretches or even exceeds our ability to understand or know it. This argument in turn stems from the assertion that the Holocaust was unprecedented, singular, and unique. The historian Eberhard Jäckel has succinctly summarized why this should be so:

The Nazi extermination of the Jews was unique because never before had a state, under the responsible authority of its leader, decided and announced that a specific group of human beings, including the old, the women, the children, and the infants, would be killed to the very last one, and implemented this decision with all the means at its disposal. (Qtd. in LaCapra, “Representing” 1121)

Another historian, Saul Friedländer, agrees, calling the Holocaust an “event at the limits” whose nature was “wilful, systematic, industrially organised” (“Introduction” 3). These references to industrial and bureaucratic implementation also suggest that the Holocaust was a product of modernity, an argument made explicit by Zygmunt Bauman in 1989. Bauman insisted that

the Holocaust was not simply a Jewish problem, and not an event in Jewish history alone. The Holocaust was born and executed in our modern rational society, at the high stage of our civilization and at the peak of human cultural achievement, and for this reason it is a problem of that society, civilization and culture. (x, emphasis in original)

Going beyond such socio-historic analyses, others have argued that the Holocaust’s uniqueness challenges or reveals the very nature of humanity. Hannah Arendt’s description of the “banality of evil” in her report on the Eichmann trial is an early example. More recently, Jürgen Habermas has articulated the sense that the human condition has been altered by Auschwitz:

Something happened there that no one could previously have thought even possible. It touched a deep layer of solidarity among all who have a human face. Until then - in spite of all the quasi-natural brutalities of world history - we had simply taken the integrity of this deep layer for granted. At that point a bond of naiveté was torn to shreds - a naiveté from which unquestioned traditions drew their authority, a naiveté that as such had nourished historical continuities. Auschwitz altered the conditions for the continuation of historical life contexts - and not only in Germany. (251-2)

1 LaCapra gives the original source as Eberhard Jäckel, “Die elende Praxis der Untersteller” in Die Zeit, 12 Sept. 1986. 13

Such ideas of ontological rupture and unprecedented uniqueness have strong implications for the epistemology of representation. In the postmodern philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard, particularly Heidegger and “the jews” (1990), the Holocaust becomes that which is ineffable, inexpressible, and hence beyond representation in the normal understanding of the term. Ann Parry sums up Lyotard’s view, in which the Holocaust takes on the “immemorial” status of the originary repressed: “it is a silence, lost to representation. Writing beyond the Shoah is ‘outside taste’ [. . .] reason and ethics have been negated, so purgation and renewal are impossible [. . .]. All art can do is struggle with and bear witness to the unsayable” (420).

Gillian Rose criticises this approach as leading to “Holocaust piety” (43), which she argues represents a collusion with Fascism where there should instead be an “acknowledgement of [our] mutual implication” (41). Rose writes:

To argue for silence, prayer, the banishment equally of poetry and knowledge, in short, the witness of ‘ineffability’, that is, non-representability, is to mystify something we dare not understand, because we fear that it may be all too understandable, all too continuous with what we are – human, all too human. (43, emphasis in original)

The conflict between the views of such thinkers as Lyotard and Rose has led to various binary theories of Holocaust representation being put forward. For example, Michael Rothberg, in Traumatic Realism (2000), posits an opposition between “realist” and “antirealist” approaches:

By realist I mean both an epistemological claim that the Holocaust is knowable and a representational claim that this knowledge can be translated into a familiar mimetic universe. [. . .]. By antirealist I mean both a claim that the Holocaust is not knowable or would be knowable only under radically new regimes of knowledge and that it cannot be captured in traditional representational schemata. (3-4)

Alan Mintz, in an article published in the same year, proposes an opposition between “exceptionalist” and “constructivist” views. The exceptionalist standpoint is “rooted in a conviction of the Holocaust as a radical rupture in human history that goes well beyond notions of uniqueness” (401), while the constructivists stress “the cultural lens through which the Holocaust is perceived” (402). This idea that some commentators are 14 more “constructive” than others takes even more polemical form in Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi’s analysis, in 1996, of the stultifying effect of resistance to interpretation and representation. Ezrahi uses the terms “absolutist” and “relativist”, noting that in writings about the Holocaust, “History is appropriated either as a set of documents frozen in time and providing the locus that articulates the Event itself or yielding to ongoing interpretative and narrative enterprises”. While the absolutist camp sets limits to representation, the relativists’ challenges to these restrictions “arise from the principle of desire and change as a counterforce to the rituals and myths that freeze memory” (135). Thus Ezrahi implies two things: firstly, that any limits, such as to what can or cannot be said about the experiences of victims, are problematic insofar as they tend towards reinforcing a frozen stasis that obstructs the process of mourning; and secondly, that writing should be creatively experimental to the extent that it achieves change, progress and movement, in defiance of the “collective enforcement of propriety over the past” (136) that the absolutists would impose.

Thus the debate becomes one between movement and resistance, freedom and constriction. Fiction, in this context, has drawn criticism for its tendency to encourage free movement across boundaries. In Between Witness and Testimony (2001), Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer argue that fictional narrative tends towards redemption, whether through identification with the protagonists of the story or by gaining knowledge of the event being narrated. For these authors, neither of these outcomes is possible in the case of the Holocaust, which “exceeds our ability to identify with or come to know [it]” (ix). In similar vein, Robert Eaglestone, in The Holocaust and the Postmodern (2004), places the problem of identification at the centre of the debate, arguing that “the reading that fiction requires too often demands the sort of process of identification that ‘consumes’ the events” (132).

I deal with Eaglestone’s arguments in detail in Chapter 2 of the present study. For now it will suffice to draw attention to the way Bernard-Donals, Glejzer and Eaglestone focus on ideas of resistance, whether of writers to the subject, or of the Holocaust to attempts to fictionalize it. The problem with this approach is that it is in one sense a lost cause. Countless examples of Holocaust narratives already exist, and for better or worse, they influence our view of the event. As James E. Young argued as long ago as 1988, “What is remembered of the Holocaust depends on how it is remembered, and 15 how events are remembered depends in turn on the texts now giving them form” (1). Thus, for Young, books being written now represent whatever meaning the Holocaust has; there is no underlying objective truth for which to search, no locus of absolute Event to be discovered. Sweeping aside Ezrahi’s “absolutists”, this approach frees narrative fiction from its chains of attachment to the historical past. If, as Young implies, the text gives form to the memory (literally creates it), then any “limits” to its scope can only be textual, not epistemological. In this model, what Berel Lang saw as the inherent problem of “falsification” through the suggestion of alternative perspectives is removed, and the writer is at liberty to explore the theme of the Holocaust in “limitless” creative ways. While Young does not explicitly advocate this, it is the logical result of his important insight that representation and reality exist not in an oppositional or hierarchical relationship but a symbiotic one.

Another argument in support of alternative perspectives is put forward by Michael André Bernstein in Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (1994). Bernstein is motivated by a desire to respect the particular moral universe inhabited by Holocaust victims, and avoid imposing retrospective judgement upon them. He criticizes a narrative move he labels “backshadowing”, which “is a kind of retroactive foreshadowing, in which the shared knowledge of the outcome of a series of events by a narrator and listener is used to judge the participants in those events as though they too should have known what was to come” (16, emphasis in original). Bernstein gives the example of Aharon Appelfeld’s novel Badenheim 1939 (1980), in which, Bernstein argues, the Jewish characters appear to be judged for not anticipating their fate. In contrast, Bernstein advocates “sideshadowing”, a narrative strategy which emphasizes the individual contingencies and motivations behind each act or decision, rather than submission to a pre-determined teleology. Sideshadowing, then, consists of “gesturing to the side, to a present dense with multiple, and mutually exclusive, possibilities for what is to come” (1).

Bernstein’s argument is a practical recommendation for how the Holocaust may be represented. Another is implied by Eric Santner’s warning against “narrative fetishism”, which is “the construction and deployment of a narrative consciously or unconsciously designed to expunge the traces of the trauma or loss that called the narrative into being in the first place” (144). Santner’s examples include the diverting 16 love stories in the German television series Heimat, and the uplifting ending of Schindler’s List (1993). A solution to this problem is proposed by Gillian Rose, who argues that the desired effect on an audience should not be the “sentimental tears” provoked by Spielberg’s film, but “the dry eyes of a deep grief” (54). This is to be achieved by combining the “fascism of representation” with the “representation of Fascism” (41). In another approach, Saul Friedländer has attempted to define what might constitute “adequacy” in Holocaust representation. Citing Ida Fink’s short stories and Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985), Friedländer finds a “common denominator”, which is

the exclusion of straight, documentary realism, but the use of some sort of allusive or distanced realism. Reality is there, in its starkness, but perceived through a filter: that of memory (distance in time), that of spatial displacement, that of some sort of narrative margin which leaves the unsayable unsaid. (“Introduction” 17, emphasis in original)

I return to Rose and Friedländer’s arguments in Chapter 4 of the present study, where I apply them to the work of W. G. Sebald.

Meanwhile, yet another example of a recommendation for Holocaust representation comes from Geoffrey Hartman:

Art can and does move away from historical reference by a characteristic distancing. Moreover, even so estranging an event as the Shoah may have to be estranged again, through art, insofar as its symbols become trite and ritualistic rather than realising. (“Introduction” 19)

This process of “distancing” and “estrangement” will necessarily require experiment and risk, and in the first book-length study of recent novels on the subject, Holocaust Fiction (2000), Sue Vice argues forcefully in favour of such an approach to narrative. Discussing the reasons for the “scandal[ized]” (2) critical reception to much Holocaust fiction, Vice argues that reviewers and scholars often mistakenly apply the rules of testimony or memoir to the genre. One of these supposed rules is that the biography of the author must stand up to scrutiny; the author must have “authority”. Another is that one only has the “right” to approach the subject if one is Jewish or related to a survivor. Vice says that these rules of testimony should not be applied to fiction, arguing that “it is important to understand the view which values testimony over all fictional genres for 17 what it is – an estimate based on non-literary criteria, and it is precisely those criteria with which I am concerned here” (7). This frees Vice to consider various novels in terms of their literary merit, using the tools of Bakhtinian poetics. She criticizes Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces for “trying to wring aesthetic and meaningful comfort from an event which offers no redemption of any kind” (9). Instead Vice favours novels which “push to [extremes] their novelistic constituents” (8). Holocaust fiction, for Vice, should be “unaccommodating” to the reader, producing an effect of “disruption and unease” (161). She goes further by giving fiction a licence to take any kind of risk: “By contrast to the poetic option, I argue that crude narration, irony, black humour, appropriation, sensationalism, even characters who mouth antisemitic slogans, do not seem as suspect” (9). The point for Vice is to avoid soothing the reader with certain kinds of style and instead use experimentation to provoke feelings of unsettlement that in turn force the reader to engage more directly with the subject-matter.

Vice’s careful separation of the “genres” of testimony and fiction echoes a concern across much critical writing about the Holocaust. For example, Gillian Banner, in Holocaust Literature: Schulz, Levi, Spiegelman and the Memory of the Offence (2000), addresses the problem as it is raised by the three authors in her title. She acknowledges that Schulz’s fictions contain elements of autobiography, and that Levi and Spiegelman’s autobiographical narratives contain aspects of fiction. Despite the evidence of this cross-pollination, Banner insists that boundaries must be maintained, and asserts that this may be achieved by assessing (authorial) “intention”:

As good postmodernists, we all recognize the fictionalizing and shaping that take place in any ‘true’ story and would assert that no telling is free of the editing and narrating that also goes to make fiction. In this view Schulz’s stories are likely to be autobiographical to the extent that Levi’s memoir is fictional. I would argue that whilst these ideas are not only persuasive but also beneficial in approaches to most other literature, they do present dangers when applied to the literature of the Holocaust. The tendency to relativism which counts Sophie's Choice and If This is a Man as equally ‘fictitious’ or ‘true’ does a disservice in the case of this particular genre. [. . .]. [. . .] when reading the literature of the Holocaust, the distinctions between those texts which are intended as fictions and those which are not, need to be recognized and maintained. (5).

The problem with this argument is that it relies on a strict “distinction” between fiction and non-fiction that, as Banner acknowledges, is not borne out in narrative practice. 18

The twin assertions that texts do cross the divide and that the barrier must be maintained cannot be simultaneously sustained. Moreover, whether a text is labelled fiction or non- fiction results not just from the author’s stated “intention” (which may or may not be trustworthy or relevant) but also from the editorial and marketing decisions of publishers. Neither of these criteria are particularly satisfactory, particularly when addressing such an urgent question as the ethics of Holocaust narrative. Instead, it may be more productive to acknowledge that the supposed boundaries between testimony and fiction, historical and figurative discourse, referentiality and imaginative construction, (auto)biography and invention, have been routinely breached throughout the history of prose narrative. In this study, I wish to avoid these artificial boundaries and reductive opposites to analyse instead a range of texts for the ethical positions revealed by their various narrative strategies in approaching the Holocaust. These positions may be most effectively elucidated, in my view, by evaluating the role of the narrator in each text. Wilkomirski’s ‘I’ not only claims to remember a past that is not his, but also sets out to deceive the reader as to its function within the text. Michaels’ narrators promote over-identification with victims and alignment of those born after with genuine witnesses. Sebald, in contrast, constructs what I call an “empathic narrative persona” in order to negotiate such ethical problems, while Foer’s approach includes a “dual persona” whose function is to foreground the irrecoverable epistemological and generational distance between past and present. By thus examining the relationships between author, narrator and text, I argue that the dead ends of authority and authenticity, which stem from false oppositions based on genre and which result in either condemnation or acceptance into a “canon” of Holocaust literature, may be transcended. Indeed, writers like Sebald and Foer self-reflexively foreground their engagement with these problems, suggesting that the concerns of those who disapprove of certain forms of Holocaust representation need not remain outside the narrative but may be usefully integrated within the text itself. In doing so they also answer the ethical concern about crossing the boundary between testimony and fiction by foregrounding their use of elements from both genres.

Along with Vice and Banner’s interventions, there have been several other significant contributions to the critical debate on contemporary Holocaust literature in the last decade or so. Nicola King’s Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self (1999) considers both fictional and biographical narratives in terms of the common way they 19 reveal the construction of identity. Taking examples from “women’s writing” and popular fiction as well as Holocaust narratives, King’s thesis is that identity is constructed through the “I”-narrator’s dialogue between present narration and past experience, a process of “re-membering” or putting back together the two parts of the self inhabiting these realms. This approach highlights the difference between the narrating “I” and the subject of that narration, which are too often taken to be identical. It also draws on the interest in memory and trauma that emerged in the 1990s, a field which underlies Whitehead’s Trauma Fiction (2004). Among Whitehead’s examples are several works dealing with the Holocaust: Fragments, Fugitive Pieces, Caryl Phillips’ The Nature of Blood (1997), and selections from Sebald’s oeuvre. Whitehead makes an explicit link between “trauma theory” and contemporary fiction, asserting that each informs the other. Specifically, she invokes Cathy Caruth’s development of Freud’s Nachträglichkeit theory into the concept of “belatedness” to account for instances of nonlinear narrative and the presence of ghosts and haunting in recent fiction (the exemplar being Toni Morrison’s Beloved). Whitehead also asserts that the “key stylistic features” of trauma fiction, “intertextuality, repetition and a dispersed or fragmented narrative voice” (84), imitate the workings of traumatic memory: “Novelists have frequently found that the impact of trauma can only adequately be represented by mimicking its forms and symptoms, so that temporality and chronology collapse, and narratives are characterized by repetition and indirection” (3). Finally, Whitehead shows how trauma fiction draws on both postmodernism – in its critique of grand narratives, foregrounding of memory, and testing of formal boundaries – and on postcolonialism – for her new category’s “concern with the recovery of memory and acknowledgement of the denied, the repressed and the forgotten” (82). Trauma, for Whitehead, is the dominant mode both of real-world experience and literary expression at the turn of the century. In Chapter 1 of the present study I challenge some of the tenets of trauma theory that underlie Whitehead’s thesis, including Caruthian belatedness.

Another thesis drawing on trauma theory, this time in order to exclusively address Holocaust representation, is proposed by Ernst van Alphen in Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory (1997). Van Alphen invokes the more contentious assertion of Caruth and others that trauma represents a literal truth about the past, unmediated by the usual distortions of memory. He writes: 20

“Whereas a memory is clearly distinct from the event being remembered – it is the memory of something – in the case of trauma, reality and representation are inseparable. There is no distinction: the representation is the event” (36). Combining this with speech-act theory, van Alphen advances the argument that certain imaginative artworks achieve “Holocaust effects” or performative “reenactments” which enable the audience to “keep in touch” with the past in an unmediated manner. This act is a presentation rather than representation. “When I call something a Holocaust effect, I mean to say that we are not confronted with a representation of the Holocaust, but that we, as viewers or readers, experience directly a certain aspect of the Holocaust or of Nazism, of that which led to the Holocaust” (10). The twin problems highlighted by this approach – a reliance on contested ideas about traumatic memory, and a tendency to over-identify with the victims of the past – are explored in detail in the first two chapters of the present study.

Rothberg’s Traumatic Realism provides a useful nuance to this debate. The new category proposed by his title is described as not an “act of passive mimesis”, but rather an “attempt to produce the traumatic event as an object of knowledge and to program and thus transform its readers so that they are forced to acknowledge their relationship to posttraumatic culture” (103). Thus Rothberg seems to argue that traumatic realism “produce[s]” the event in the present rather than depicting it in the past, in an apparent echo of van Alphen’s ideas of performative reenactment. Yet Rothberg’s only reference to van Alphen’s book is to criticize its “vague and indefensible assertions about the relationship of art to historical events” (277), and to argue that “the notion that ‘we’ can reexperience the Holocaust is absurd and dangerous” (278). This is because Rothberg’s concern is more pedagogic than personal. While van Alphen’s impetus is his own childhood memory of stifled debate in post-war Holland, Rothberg appears motivated by a desire to “program” readers with knowledge. This didactic impulse leads to an attempt to corral the various movements of literary history into a productive combination. In Rothberg’s tripartite schema, Holocaust literature responds to “a demand for documentation, a demand for reflection on the formal limits of representation, and a demand for the risky public circulation of discourses on the events” (7). These three demands correspond in turn to realism (“strategies for referring to and documenting the world”), modernism (which “questions its ability to document history transparently”) and postmodernism (which “responds to the economic and 21 political conditions of its emergence and public circulation”) (9). “Traumatic realism”, then, combines all three of these elements in variable amounts in order to respond to the particular difficulties of Holocaust representation. Examples given by Rothberg include works by Ruth Kluger, Art Spiegelman, and Philip Roth.

These monographs by Vice, Banner, King, van Alphen and Rothberg – not to mention less theoretical examples such as Christopher Bigsby’s Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust (2006) and Daniel R. Schwarz’s Imagining the Holocaust (1999) – have little difficulty locating examples of “Holocaust literature” on which to comment. Yet their examples almost exclusively originate from outside the location of the original event, and more pointedly, from the dispersed victim population rather than the perpetrator collective. In contrast, Ernestine Schlant’s The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust (1999) is a comprehensive chronological survey of post- war non-Jewish German authors who address the Holocaust, and as her title implies, Schlant finds their output less than helpful. Drawing on Freud’s theories of melancholy and mourning, Schlant argues that there is a “silence” in her objects of study which results from an authorial strategy (perhaps unconscious) of avoidance and omission. Because of this silence there has yet to be a proper “working through” by the German people. The nature of the task Schlant feels is necessary is revealed in her analysis of W. G. Sebald, whom she considers to have broken the pattern. In The Emigrants, Schlant argues, Sebald “begins to mourn the destruction of Jews in Germany – a unique achievement in German literature – and gives voice to the culture and the lives that were destroyed. Here, the language of silence is broken and a long-delayed melancholy emerges” (19).

Schlant’s analysis reveals the importance attached to the way those living many decades later should “remember” the Holocaust and its victims. Some have argued that this temporal and generational distance has turned out to be helpful for understanding. Psychotherapist Dori Laub has posited a “historical gap” (“Event” 84) akin to the latency experienced by some sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder, in which only now can events previously met with silence be meaningfully apprehended. Similarly, Saul Friedländer offers a Freudian explanation: 22

The “generation of the grandchildren”, mainly among Europeans (Germans in particular) but among Jews as well, has sufficient distance from the events in terms of both the sheer passage of time and the lack of personal involvement to be able to confront the full impact of the past. Thus, the expansion of memory of the Shoah could be interpreted as the gradual lifting, induced by the passage of time, of collective repression. (“History” 274)

Friedländer’s argument brings together the twin concerns of the twentieth century’s obsession with memory: the individual and the collective. Theories of the individual psyche stem not just from Freudian psychoanalysis but also from the philosophy of Henri Bergson and the literary innovations of Marcel Proust. Meanwhile, models of “collective memory” have been developed since Maurice Halbwachs’ mid-century interventions by historians such as Pierre Nora and cultural critics like Andreas Huyssen (both of whom are dealt with in Chapter 3 of the present study). However, there are several other dimensions to contemporary interest in memory. In answer to the question of why people choose to remember a past in which they did not take part, several answers present themselves. Jewish tradition and religious practice has always emphasized both remembering the experience of one’s ancestors and understanding the present as part of a continuum with the past (a tendency fondly satirized by Foer in Everything is Illuminated, as I discuss in Chapter 5). In the wider community, “Holocaust remembrance” is understood as an exhortation to “never forget”, which in turn may help society avoid prejudice, persecution and genocide in the future. This latter project includes the preservation of survivor testimony by such projects as the Fortunoff Archive and the Shoah Foundation, and collective acts of remembrance such as “Holocaust Memorial Day” and the visiting of Holocaust museums as part of Western tourism.

Another important dimension of the contemporary negotiation with memory is its relation to history. Richard Terdiman, in Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (1993), argues that the recent obsession with memory is in effect a product of the historical process of modernity. Elsewhere memory has been embraced as a model for challenging history. In an article published in 2004, Meredith Criglington succinctly describes this phenomenon:

Memory’s relative or chronotopic structure provides a critical model for examining representations of the past. The shifting, mediated, and constructed 23

nature of memory challenges more traditional historiographic modes that tend to appear static, transcendent, and naturalized. Close attention to the operation of memory reminds us that all historical knowledge is relational, contingent, and “situated” (Haraway); in other words, history is shaped according to our present needs. Moreover, an awareness that memory is partial, in the double sense of being incomplete and subjective, creates slippages and gaps through which contesting voices, or even silences, can emerge. (130)

This potential of memory to generate new ways of thinking about the past has been a strong influence on contemporary narratives of the Holocaust. It is one of the paradoxes of Holocaust representation that those who cannot have direct memory of the event nevertheless tend to draw on it as a central metaphor, symbol, or other generative device for their narratives. This is certainly the case in the examples dealt with in the present study, for which I will now attempt to define some categorical boundaries. While the reductive nature of this must be acknowledged, it may nevertheless help to clarify my overall thesis and provide grounding for the chapters that follow.

In the present study, then, I am considering post-1990 European and North American Holocaust narratives, with a fictional element, by non-survivors. This last condition seems to me the most significant. Given the insoluble difficulties, alluded to above, of separating prose narratives into genres of, for example, “fiction” and “testimony”, the distinction between survivor-witnesses and the rest is perhaps the only stable pillar left for critics to hold on to. Indeed, this may explain why Fragments, with its author’s claim to be a witness when historical documents prove that he cannot possibly have been so, has been considered so important by critics (I sketch this response to the “Wilkomirski affair” in Chapter 3). Meanwhile, my decision to exclude survivors from my purview is also an inevitable result of privileging contemporary examples, with most witnesses now having died. More importantly, accounts by survivor-witnesses present their own particular problems regarding the boundaries between fact and fiction, or testimony and imagination, that are beyond the scope of the present study. The question of whether Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man or Elie Wiesel’s Night (both 1958) contain fictional elements is very different from the issues raised by the generic hybridity found in books by Sebald and Foer. Survivors may or may not fictionalize their memories, consciously or unconsciously (and some would say inevitably); but they nevertheless form a distinct group by dint of having any personal memory on which to draw. 24

It is for similar reasons that I do not include examples from the burgeoning category of “second generation” Holocaust narratives. This important group, examined in detail in Efraim Sicher’s edited collection Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz (1998), is usually restricted to books by authors whose parents were Holocaust survivors. Thus while Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces deals with this topic, it nevertheless would fall out of Sicher’s category by dint of its author’s parentage. Elsewhere, in his Introduction to Holocaust Novelists (2004), Sicher has set out criteria for this category based on the connection between an author’s biography, psychology and output:

The second generation feels an urgent need to transmit the testimony of the ageing survivors to the next generation, both as carriers of memory and as fighters against Holocaust denial. The generational transfer of posttraumatic memory has given children of survivors the feeling of being maimed by history before their births, and they have had to come to terms with a past of which they have no personal memory by imagining it creatively in novels, poetry and plays. (“Introduction” xvii)

Sicher’s determining factor, “generational transfer of posttraumatic memory,” reflects a widespread assumption that will be interrogated throughout the present study, especially in Chapters 1 and 5. While such “transfer” is questionable, its acceptance in the critical community leads me to set aside “second generation” novelists, along with survivor- authors, as having different claims to witness than those with no direct connection to the Holocaust.

Among the dozens of examples of the “second generation” Sicher cites are Art Spiegelman, Thane Rosenbaum, Melvin Jules Bukiet and David Grossman. While the first three of these live and write in the United States, the presence of Grossman in the list reveals a crossover between the categories of “second generation” and “Israeli novelists”.2 Grossman’s See Under: Love (first published in Hebrew in 1986) is probably the best-known work of fiction that articulates the particular situation of growing up in postwar Israel with Holocaust survivors for parents. It is also representative of a significant historical shift in Israeli literature in general, according to

2 It is of course also possible to distinguish (as Sicher does in The Holocaust Novel) between Israeli writers and “Jewish-American post-Holocaust novelists” such as Saul Bellow. 25 the critic Gilead Morahg. In an article published in 1999, Morahg analyses the reasons for the avoidance of the topic by Israeli authors in the first decades after the war. Although a few novels appeared at this time, they tended to deal with the aftermath rather than tackle the ghetto or camp. Morahg argues that “it is likely that the prolonged absence of the Holocaust theme from the literature is not a manifestation of a general national amnesia, but rather a specific consequence of a cultural code that controlled the uses to which Holocaust references could be put” (459). This cultural code arose in part from the difficulty of assimilating to a new country and the shame or guilt over having survived. It also included the influence of “Zionist discourse”, which, Morahg writes,

did not deny the agony and the horror of the events of the Holocaust, but it did deny the relevance of these events to the Israeli experience and the formation of Israeli identity. And since Israeli literature was intensely preoccupied with matters of Israeli experience and Israeli identity, the Holocaust was largely excluded from its domain. It remained a dark and silent backdrop against which a brilliant new reality was being etched. The first two generations of Israeli writers implicitly denied their affinity with the murdered Jews of Europe by insisting on an almost absolute difference from them. (459)

Thus, Morahg explains, the experience of survivor-witnesses became “sanctified”, and for anyone else to describe such experience was “an intolerable violation of a sacred taboo” (459). Once again the distinction between survivors and the rest is paramount. The taboo was only broken when the children of survivors grew up to become writers themselves. Morahg writes that since 1980, novelists have started to recognize the importance of the Holocaust to contemporary Israeli experience. They record the psychological damage and explore origins and consequences. Morahg cites, along with Grossman, the writers Yitzhak Ben-Ner, Dorit Peleg and Itamar Levi. In their work he finds a common element of Todorov’s “fantastic”, the juxtaposition of realist narrative with fantastical elements, which Morahg judges fitting for the theme.

It is not only in Israel that non-realist modes of Holocaust fiction have become increasingly prevalent. Daniel R. Schwarz, in Imagining the Holocaust (1999), distinguishes four categories of writing on the topic: memoirs; realism; myth, parable and fable; and fantasy. He argues that myth and fantasy come more to the fore as time passes, and, like Morahg, that such approaches illuminate the theme. Efraim Sicher agrees, arguing that “Imagination and fantasy need not necessarily impair authenticity” 26

(Holocaust Novel xiii). Nevertheless, another strand has evolved that prefers to ground its fiction in fact. Jean-François Steiner’s Treblinka (1966), Anatolii Kusnetsov’s Babii Yar (1967), Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark (1982) and Alexander Ramati’s And The Violins Stopped Playing (1985) all purport to weave documented fact into narrative fiction. Others, like John Hersey’s The Wall (1950), imitate the conventions of the diary, adding an effect of verisimilitude. However, as shown by the discussion of Ian McEwan’s Atonement above, these “historical”, “documentary” or “factional” novels necessarily generate controversy. The choices they make in their use of historical materials are always open to question, and their ethical stance in choosing to fictionalize real people and events is likewise inherently contestable.

The final category typically offered by commentators on Holocaust literature is that of the postmodern. We have already seen that critics like Whitehead and Rothberg consider this to be a vital component of contemporary literatures of trauma. Sicher argues that what he calls “postmodernist ‘Holocaust fictions’” are “not concerned with historical descriptions of Nazi genocide, but with what it can suggest about the postmodern aftermath, when delusions of liberal humanism have been shattered” (Holocaust Novel 175). As such they may represent a response to or echo of the postmodern view of the Holocaust itself, as put forward by Lyotard and others. Nicola King notes that postmodernism’s characteristic challenge to traditional views of history and truth risks a dangerous level of relativism, yet also provides a productive perspective for addressing the representational challenges inherent in the Holocaust itself. She writes:

Postmodern fiction thus interrogates the memory of the Holocaust in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and, through its circulation in popular culture, breaks the “limits of representation” that critics such as the philosopher Berel Lang and the Holocaust survivor and novelist Elie Wiesel believe are appropriate. [. . .]. Postmodern techniques may impart a sense of the “unrepresentable” more effectively than realism; postmodern fiction “defamiliarizes” the over-familiar and often demonstrates how the Holocaust has become commodified or turned into spectacle. [. . .]. In imagining a range of responses, from denial at one extreme to continued remembrance at the other, postmodern fiction forms an intervention into the debate over how, if at all, the Holocaust may be represented. (“Appendix” 393-4) 27

Sicher and King both cite around a dozen examples of “postmodernist Holocaust fiction”. Some of those mentioned are Don DeLillo’s satire White Noise (1984), in which the history of Nazism appears as just another commodity in a world of simulacra; Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991), where time and history are narrated in reverse; Emily Prager’s allegorical Eve’s Tattoo (1992), which satirizes the modern culture of memorialization (and which I discuss in Chapter 2 of the present study); Christopher Hope’s Serenity House (1992), which draws parallels between surveillance and tourism in contemporary Western “civilized” society and the recent Nazi past; Robert Harris’s counterfactual Fatherland (1992), set in a 1960s Germany where Hitler has survived the war and the disappearance of the Jews has gone unnoticed; and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001), which explores the legacy of the Holocaust through the eyes of a Kindertransport survivor (which I analyze in detail in Chapter 4). Sicher also includes Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces in his list, and one would expect Foer’s Everything is Illuminated to be included in future surveys, particularly for its parody of Holocaust tourism. This suggests that the works I have chosen for the present study are all in some sense “postmodern”, raising the question of whether I will be interrogating them in that light.

While the lens of postmodernist thought has indeed been a productive tool for understanding these texts, the present study will have a different focus. My chief emphasis is on the relationship between the writer and text in the present and the events and victims of the past, and the ethical and epistemological problems this raises. I am, therefore, interested in post-1990 non-survivor Holocaust narratives from the West for the narrative strategies they employ to foreground their engagement with these issues, rather than the correlation between these strategies and the “postmodern condition” as such. While recent prose narratives may or may not employ postmodern techniques, what they have in common is a focus on the ethical problems of writing and remembering the Holocaust from their standpoint of historical and generational distance, while revealing their desire for connection with the past.

Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs (1992), for example, is a metafictional exploration of how evil in the past is remembered in the present. Its present-day narrator, Jeremy, undertakes to write a memoir of his mother-in-law, June Tremaine. Jeremy’s first- person narrative about this project alternates with third-person episodes from June’s life 28 in post-war England and France. The central transfiguring event of June’s story, saved until the end, is an encounter with two black dogs during her honeymoon in 1946. On a hillside path in France, briefly separated from her new husband, June is faced with the hungry, snarling animals. Formerly a strict atheist – she and her husband are communist intellectuals – June offers a prayer, has a vision of God, and miraculously manages to fend off the dogs with a penknife. Later, the local villagers say that the dogs are left behind from the German occupation, and that they had been trained by the Gestapo to attack and even rape women. The significance of June’s encounter is twofold: her subsequent belief in spiritualism drives a wedge between June and her arch-materialist husband; and the black dogs come to signify for her the embodiment of evil that perpetually lurks below the surface of European civilization, and which may reappear at any time. Thus evil is figured as resistant to rational explanation – its effects are felt on more instinctual levels. In a present-day episode, Jeremy visits the former concentration camp at Majdanek with a woman he has just met at a conference. Their reaction to the horror they feel is a life-affirming three-day bout of lovemaking. The connection between present-day Majdanek and the memory of Nazi atrocities in France is thus embodied not in June but in Jeremy, whose narration is revealed as a self- reflexive examination of his own motives in investigating the lives of earlier generations. In effect, McEwan’s novel takes on the form of memoir, metafictionally acknowledging the importance of this genre to Holocaust literature, while also foregrounding the gulf between generations in how the past is apprehended.

A similar concern informs Helen Darville’s The Hand That Signed the Paper (1994), a novel which explores Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis from the perspective of the niece of a man indicted for war crimes in present-day Australia. In addition to this framing narrative, in which Fiona Kovalenko helps her elderly uncle Vitaly get legal representation (though he dies before the trial begins), the story of Vitaly’s youth in 1930s and 1940s Europe is presented. Vitaly and his family are brutalized by Stalin’s imposition of communism, making them ripe for recruitment to the Nazi cause. Vitaly joins the Waffen SS and serves at Treblinka, killing daily, while his sister Katerina becomes the mistress of a Nazi officer. After the war the Kovalenkos are reunited at Displaced Persons camps in Italy before being resettled in Surrey, and eventually taking up permanent residentship in Australia. In this novel, the psychology of violence and racial hatred is intimately explored, with the narrative conveying a powerful suggestion 29 that social marginalization, hunger and ignorance are more important factors than race or ideology. “The brothers Kovalenko and their comrades – Nikolai and Shura – did not kill Jews just because they were poor and Ukrainian, and did not know any better. They killed Jews because they believed that they themselves were savages” (77). However, the lack of an authoritative narrator (the wartime story is focalized through several characters, Ukrainian and German) leads to a suspicion of moral equivocation. Fiona asks Vitaly if he is sorry for the past, but he gives no clear answer. Fiona herself refuses to condemn the actions of her forebears, instead concentrating on shielding her family from harm. This book thus addresses the difficult question of how descendants should approach the actions of a previous generation whose choices were radically unlike our own. The scandal that surrounded its publication only reinforces this theme. The Hand That Signed the Paper was originally published under the pseudonym “Helen Demidenko”, the similarity to the narrator’s name “Kovalenko” implying that it was a disguised account of the author’s own family history. This impression was further supported by her behaviour during the book’s publicity, in which she dressed up in Ukrainian clothing. The author was soon unmasked as an Australian of Anglo-Saxon extraction, but not before she had won three literary prizes. In her chapter on this novel in Holocaust Fiction, Vice lists the elements of the “Demidenko affair” as “alleged plagiarism, antisemitism, inauthenticity, appropriation, historical revisionism, [and] masquerade” (142).

Vice also notes how the book led to, or coincided with, problems between the Jewish and Ukrainian communities in Australia, and how it was condemned for “humanizing” perpetrators. LaCapra is one critic who has criticized giving a voice to perpetrators, arguing that it creates “an objectionable (or at best deeply equivocal) kind of discomfort or unease in the reader or viewer by furthering fascination and a confused sense of identification with or involvement in certain figures and their beliefs or actions in a manner that may well subvert judgment and critical response” (Writing 202-3). LaCapra cites George Steiner’s Portage to San Cristóbal of A. H. (1981), which dares to focalize Hitler, and Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser (1995; translated as The Reader, 1997), one of whose central characters is a former concentration camp guard. Schlink’s narrative is of particular relevance to the present study. In a German town in 1958, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg has an affair with Hanna Schmitz, a tram conductor twenty-one years his senior. At times she abuses him, and also asks him to read to her 30 before making love. Their liaison ends. Eight years later, Michael, now a law student, witnesses Hanna’s trial for war crimes, discovering that she was a Nazi guard who allowed a group of Jewish women to burn to death in a church. Michael also belatedly realises that Hanna is illiterate, and that this disability has to an extent shaped her life choices. It emerges that Hanna got Jewish women to read to her before she sent them to the gas chamber. Was this an act of compassion, or did she send them to the chamber to protect her secret? The narrative does not make this clear, but Hanna is judged guilty by the court and sentenced to life imprisonment. Later, Michael begins to send Hanna recordings of himself reading aloud, through which she cures her illiteracy by comparing the tapes with books in the prison library. The day before her planned release, Hanna commits suicide. Michael tries to give the money he inherits from Hanna to a Jewish survivor, who refuses. Instead he donates it to a charity specialising in illiteracy. Thus the theme of this novel – Germany’s difficulty in coming to terms with its past – is figured through the metaphor of illiteracy and its “cure”. Michael is innocent yet becomes complicit through his status as “reader”, that is, through his interaction with a perpetrator, Hanna, who is in turn the embodiment of Michael’s (and Germany’s) obscure sense of guilt. Schlink’s narrative subtly addresses important themes including the difficulty of judgement, the unreliability of evidence, and the problem of assigning guilt and responsibility in an ambiguous moral universe. The same concerns are found in Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room (2001), whose third section in particular is a moving and thought-provoking examination of a contemporary German’s obsession with what his grandfather may have done in the war. As such I briefly discuss Seiffert’s novel in Chapter 5 in relation to Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, whose plot similarly hinges on the secrets kept by the previous generation but one. Indeed, this perspective of attempting to address the past through personal familial connections, whose lives nevertheless took place at an irreducible distance from one’s own, both temporally and metaphorically, seems to me a highly useful way to generate transgenerational empathy.

Before addressing these texts, and exploring how they enact transgenerational empathy in narrative, I turn to the topic of trauma theory, in order to evaluate what contribution this field can make to understanding Holocaust memory in contemporary narratives. 31

Chapter 1

Moving beyond notions of literal truth and the belated sublime: the historical, political and clinical controversies of trauma

To what extent are contemporary Holocaust narratives analogous to, comparable with, or even attributable to “traumatic memory”? Conversely, how useful is this phenomenon as a tool with which to gain insight into the workings of such narratives? According to Shoshana Felman, “The twentieth century can be defined as a century of trauma” (Juridical 171 n.1). But does that mean that trauma should be the only or central concept with which to analyze and understand that century and its representations? This chapter will investigate the origins and debates of “trauma theory” in order to assess its usefulness and relevance to contemporary Holocaust narratives.

The word trauma, which comes from the Greek for wound, has been associated with physical injury since the late seventeenth century. It did not make the transition to study of the mind until two hundred years later, when, in 1889, “traumatic neurosis” and “traumatic psychosis” made their first appearances in print (attributed to the neurologists Hermann Oppenheim and Jean-Martin Charcot respectively).3 This transition from the physiological to the psychological sphere is worth bearing in mind when considering the multiple meanings of trauma today. The association brings ideas of violence, laceration and pain, which contribute to the power the term carries in contemporary discourse. The connection also implies that psychological trauma is caused by an external source. Freud wrote in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920) that traumas are “those excitations from outside that are strong enough to break through the protective barrier” of consciousness (68). But trauma is also etymologically connected to the German word traum, meaning both dream and nightmare, suggesting the role of internal factors in the aetiology of symptoms. Indeed, this problem of inside versus outside is crucial to an understanding of the controversies surrounding trauma. Whether the memory of a trauma refers to a real event, something imagined, or

3 “trauma” and “traumatic”. Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. “traumatic neurosis” n. A Dictionary of Psychology. Andrew M. Colman. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Exeter University. Accessed 5 Aug. 2008. 32 something in between, is the central difficulty informing not just medico-legal issues like “false memory syndrome” but also the critical discourse known as “trauma theory” or “trauma studies”.

The foundation on which trauma studies are based is the symptomatology of shocking events. Since the nineteenth century, various terms have been offered to describe the symptoms presented by victims of train crashes, trench warfare, concentration camps, sexual violence, and other horrifying experiences. Descriptions such as “fright neurosis”, “war/combat neurosis”, “shell shock”, “survivor syndrome” and “concentration camp syndrome” have all fallen into disuse or become historicized. Nowadays, “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” (“PTSD”) has become the ubiquitous diagnosis for everyone from hostages and rape victims to survivors of car crashes and returnees from war zones. This gathering together of disparate groups relies on certain assumptions about memory which originate in the late nineteenth century but have become more pervasive since 1980. The most important of these is the theory of dissociation. As Ruth Leys explains in Trauma: A Genealogy (2000):

Post-traumatic stress disorder is fundamentally a disorder of memory. The idea is that, owing to the emotions of terror and surprise caused by certain events, the mind is split or dissociated: it is unable to register the wound to the psyche because the ordinary mechanisms of awareness and cognition are destroyed. As a result, the victim is unable to recollect and integrate the hurtful experience in normal consciousness; instead, she is haunted or possessed by intrusive traumatic memories. The experience of the trauma, fixed or frozen in time, refuses to be represented as past, but is perpetually reexperienced in a painful, dissociated, traumatic present. All the symptoms characteristic of PTSD – flashbacks, nightmares and other reexperiences, emotional numbing, depression, guilt, autonomic arousal, explosive violence or tendency to hypervigilance – are thought to be the result of this fundamental mental dissociation. (2)

This psychological diagnostic has proved highly suggestive for a wide range of discourses, including political science, sociology, philosophy and history. Trauma has been used variously as a model with which to analyse historical process, interpret the testimony of survivor-victims, explain the passing on of experience through generations, and describe the collective memory of societies. Unsurprisingly, given this intellectual climate, trauma has also emerged as a major theme for writers of fiction, memoir and other narrative literature. Simultaneously it has been taken up by literary critics and thence to the realm of critical theory. 33

However, if the concept of trauma has moved from physiology to psychology, and from psychology to a range of other discourses, its meaning may be slippery and uncertain. Indeed, even within the field of psychology there are fundamental disagreements. Before coming to these, however, it may be useful to survey briefly the cultural and clinical history of trauma. Controversy in recent times has often centred on the way earlier writings have been interpreted.

In Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age (2001), editors Micale and Lerner put the emergence of psychological trauma firmly in the context of cultural modernity. They identify four distinct developments of the period 1870-1930 that helped shape the concept: the spread of railways, the advent of accident insurance in the nascent welfare state, the rise of psychological psychiatry, and World War I. Indeed, a good starting point for any history of trauma is the emergence of railway travel in the mid-nineteenth century, and the concurrent phenomenon of the train crash. Ralph Harrington explains how railway accidents focussed attention on unusual medical disorders:

In mid- and late-nineteenth-century medical and medico-legal discourse, railway accidents acquired a highly significant role as agents of traumatic experience. Few events in ordinary civilian life could equal the railway accident for violence, terror, and destruction, and it is unsurprising that this event, the product of industrialized modernity, should be seen as capable of bringing about new, insidious, highly disruptive forms of injury and disorder in the human body. Such perceptions found full expression in response to the ‘railway spine’ phenomenon, which was characterized by the manifestation of a variety of physical disorders in railway accident victims who had apparently suffered no significant organic injury. (209)

In the absence of discernible “organic injury”, then, doctors and others began to theorize a connection between the shock suffered by the mind and the physical symptoms presented by the victim. Harrington argues that while the study of “railway spine” in the 1860s has hitherto been considered the first instance of this “concept of strong emotion producing organic disorders”, in fact “a tradition of surgical enquiry along those lines existed in the 1820s and 1830s” (216). Nevertheless, mid-nineteenth century society was resistant to claims of a causal connection between mind and body. As Harrington explains, early legal compensation claims brought by rail crash victims 34 tended to rest on a distinction between mere emotional or “moral” reaction and a “nervous shock” that was “organic” in nature; proof of the latter was necessary for individuals to win against the railway companies. It was not until later in the century that neurologists and psychotherapists such as Charcot, Pierre Janet, and, later, Sigmund Freud, began to assert the existence of psychological trauma, though the cases they examined were so-called “hysterical” symptoms in women. As Leys notes in her Introduction, Charcot and Janet theorized a “wounding” of the mind owing to a sudden shock, and used “hypnotic catharsis” to treat the resulting “memory crisis” or dissociation (4). Elsewhere, Janet has been called the “the first to identify dissociation as the crucial psychological mechanism involved in the genesis of a wide variety of post traumatic symptoms” (van der Kolk, “Pierre Janet” 366), and “the first to describe the memory disturbances that accompany traumatization” (369).

However, such theories of the unconscious mind took a long time to become mainstream. Indeed, the diagnostic reaction to returning soldiers from World War I echoed the response to “railway spine”, by attributing their symptoms to physical concussion of the spine caused by exploding shells (hence the term “shell shock”, coined by Charles Stanley Myers in 1915). The experience of the trenches caused a huge range of physical symptoms, including “withered, trembling arms, paralysed hands, stumbling gaits, tics, tremors and shakes, as well as numbed muteness, palpitations, sweaty hallucinations and nightmares” (Leese 3). However, as Leys documents, most people thought sufferers from shell shock to be either malingerers motivated by cowardice or greed for compensation, or weak types inherently predisposed to break down. Nevertheless a few doctors resurrected the theory of dissociation and offered treatment using hypnosis. Given the sex of their patients, they were forced to acknowledge for the first time that men as well as women could be affected by so-called “hysterical” symptoms, or as the new term had it, “war neurosis”. However, due to the lack of agreement as to causes, treatment varied widely depending on the institution to which a soldier was sent, further reinforcing scepticism in the wider world about the reality of the condition (Leys 4-5). A few forward-thinking doctors planned to establish special centres of psychoanalytic treatment, but as Freud lamented in his Introduction to Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses (1919), the war ended before this aim could be realized: “The opportunity for a thorough investigation of these 35 affections was thus unluckily lost – though, we must add, the early recurrence of such an opportunity is not a thing to be desired” (207).

Nevertheless, some doctors attempted a more enlightened approach to shell shock or war neurosis during the war. Leys cites William Brown, who thought that the symptoms resulted from repressed emotion, that is, the necessity for soldiers to maintain self-control and discipline in the face of emotionally affecting horrors. Thus Brown’s treatment involved hypnotic cathartic or “abreaction”, an emotional acting out similar to modern “psychodynamic” therapy (Leys 84-5). Another figure, one who has become familiar through Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration (1991), is W. H. R. Rivers. This doctor and anthropologist treated, among many others, the war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen at the Craiglockhart Hydropathic Hospital in Edinburgh. In an article for The Lancet in 1918, Rivers criticizes the common advice given to sufferers of war neurosis, that they should manfully repress their memories and suppress all thoughts of war. This, he argues, results in the repressed thoughts crowding into the mind at bedtime, disrupting sleep. Instead, he notes, if patients allow their thoughts headroom in the daytime, as and when they occur, their condition improves. Indeed, Rivers, heavily influenced by Freud, goes so far as to say that the symptoms of shell shock are the result not so much of the traumatic events themselves, but of later attempts at their repression:

I hope to show that many of the most trying and distressing symptoms from which the subjects of war neurosis suffer are not the necessary result of the strains and shocks to which they have been exposed in warfare, but are due to the attempt to banish from the mind distressing memories of warfare or painful affective states which have come into being as the result of their war experience. (173)

Meanwhile, the tendency to recommend keeping a stiff upper lip in the face of trauma, which Rivers identified as unhelpful, led to some extreme forms of treatment. Canadian neurologist Lewis Yealland, for example, combined verbal chastisement with electroshock therapy. Freud, in his Appendix to “Memorandum on the Electrical Treatment of War Neurotics” (1920), reflected on how such methods came to be justified. He noted the logic of the view that if war neurosis resulted from a mental conflict between, on the one hand, an “unconscious inclination” (212) to withdraw from the horrific demands of war (self-preservation), and on the other, “motives [. . .] such as ambition, self-esteem, 36 patriotism, the habit of obedience and the example of others” (213), electrical treatment might persuade the soldier that the pain it involved was worse than the horror of returning to the front. Indeed, this method met with initial success. However, Freud argues that back at the trenches, those horrors would again become uppermost in the patient’s mind and bring back the neurosis. For Freud this proves that “the psychotherapeutic method introduced by me” (215) is a more effective treatment than electric shocks.

In her chapter on “Medics and the Military” in An Intimate History of Killing (2000), Joanna Bourke describes how the problem of war neurosis resurfaced during World War II. Once again thousands of soldiers were breaking down and presenting symptoms that made them unfit for service. Military and financial pressures led to efforts to find effective treatment and learn the lessons of the past. As Bourke explains: “During the First World War, four fifths of men who had entered hospital suffering shell shock were never able to return to military duty: it was imperative that such high levels of ‘permanent ineffectives’ were reduced” (256). Thus the emphasis was on getting soldiers back to the front as quickly as possible, using drugs such as insulin and barbiturates, often in conjunction with electroshock therapy (257-8). Bourke shows how army psychiatrists were wholly subservient to their military superiors, who insisted that war aims should take precedence over interest in the individual: “Within the armed forces, psychologists found themselves with very little independence” (262). Thus attitudes were generally unsympathetic. Bourke describes hostility towards any “feminine” or “cowardly” behaviour, regardless of the horrors the patient had suffered, witnessed or perpetrated (252-4). This macho attitude is a possible explanation for the long gap between the work done during World War II (such as Abram Kardiner’s The Traumatic Neuroses of War [1941]) and the official recognition of PTSD. Perhaps acceptance could only come in a society where those who break down are seen not as weak or cowardly, but as victims of forces beyond their control.

This change in social attitudes is clearly seen in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. In 1970s United States, groups of psychiatrists and veterans actively campaigned for recognition and compensation, and ran therapy centres and discussion groups. One of these, “Operation Outreach”, commissioned studies on the symptoms of surviving soldiers that outlined what would eventually be codified and legitimized as 37

“Posttraumatic Stress Disorder” in the Third Edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) (1980). The most important aspect of this new category of disorder was that it made a traumatic event a necessary causal factor. For the first time it was officially recognized that the horrific occurrences witnessed and perpetrated by practitioners of modern warfare could cause them psychiatric problems, regardless of previous mental state or genetic predisposition. Reactions to this development were mixed, as Richard McNally has pointed out: “While many applauded the new diagnosis as finally giving a voice to survivors of trauma, others questioned its validity, seeing it as a political artifact of the antiwar movement” (Remembering 1). Nevertheless the attitude that sees trauma as something from outside that assails an unwilling victim has become the new orthodoxy.

However, a historical overview of official reactions to soldiers’ trauma shows that the issue of external/internal aetiology is more complicated. As we have seen, the first reaction of military authorities to soldiers breaking down during World War I was to assume that a physical cause – the concussions of exploding shells affecting the spine – were to blame. In comparison, the history of “Gulf War Syndrome”, as suffered by veterans of the US-led conflict in Iraq in 1990, shows how far attitudes have changed. Symptoms of this condition include fatigue, memory problems and, later, terminal tumours and permanent neurological damage. Fred Milano, in an article published in International Social Science Review in 2000, explains how the authorities dealt with the issue at the time:

At first, the military attributed [the soldiers’ symptoms] to “stress”. Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was well-documented in Vietnam, and its crippling effects are still evident several decades after the war. It provided a convenient culprit, one already familiar to the general public. (19)

So, the immediate response to the problem was to focus not on the nature of the war itself but on the psychology of soldiers. Later, in 1996, the American Psychiatric Association published a sympathetic volume on the psychiatric fall-out of the war, bolstered by a foreword by the politician Dick Cheney.4

4 Ursano, Robert J. and Ann E. Norwood (eds). Emotional Aftermath of the Persian Gulf War: Veterans, Families, Communities, and Nations. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1996. 38

Yet this response was also seen as politically motivated evasion. As Milano says, “veterans were not buying it; they had seen this shell game before” (19). He explains how allegations emerged that the symptoms of Gulf War Syndrome were caused not by the normal stresses of war but by the combined effects of multiple vaccinations and anti-nerve gas pills, the spraying of organophosphate pesticides on military tents, and the use of depleted uranium shells. These allegations are controversial and subject to ongoing debate and investigation, by, for example, the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses in the United States. Nevertheless, the case illustrates how meanings of trauma are both historically contingent and politically motivated. The distance we have come from denying the psychological nature of shell shock to using PTSD as an excuse for (allegedly) chemically induced Gulf War Syndrome suggests that trauma is a changeable political tool rather than a stable and definable phenomenon.

In Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (1994), Judith Lewis Herman argues that the history of trauma has been politically determined from the beginning. She contends that the initial study of hysteria by Charcot and Janet “grew out of the republican, anticlerical political movement of the late nineteenth century in France”, while for both shell shock and PTSD, the “political context was the collapse of a cult of war and the growth of an anti-war movement” (9). Herman’s purpose in this historico-political contextualisation of trauma is to shift the agenda from preoccupation with “male” activities like warfare towards “female” issues such as rape and domestic abuse. For Herman, the post-1960s Western feminist movement has revealed a “combat neurosis of the sex war” (28) that should claim our attention and lead to systematized attempts at healing. That this has not yet occurred is attributed to society’s wilful turning away from such issues and refusal to face the “truth”: “When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails [. . .]” (1). Jenny Edkins, in Trauma and the Memory of Politics (2003), sees such “secrecy” as the direct result of “sovereign power, the power of the modern nation-state”. She goes on: “Sovereign power produces and is itself produced by trauma: it provokes wars, genocides and famines. But it works by concealing its involvement and claiming to be a provider not a destroyer of security” (xv). For Edkins this means that trauma results not just from violence or threats to the integrity of the self, but specifically when that threat comes from a previously trusted source: 39

What we call trauma takes place when the very powers that we are convinced will protect us and give us security become our tormentors: when the community of which we considered ourselves members turns against us or when our family is no longer a source of refuge but a site of danger. (4)

Like Herman, Edkins implies that trauma is caused by secrecy and treachery, rather than the physical act of violence as such. Again like Herman, she places abuse of women as central. “The modern state cannot be assumed to be a place of safety, any more than the patriarchal family can. Political abuse in one parallels sexual abuse in the other. Both give rise to what we call symptoms of trauma” (7).

Another important example of the implications of trauma for society and politics is the controversy over so-called “recovered memories”. Richard McNally, in his chapter on “The Politics of Trauma” in Remembering Trauma (2003), describes how this unfolded. In the United States in the 1980s, some psychologists claimed that extremely high percentages of women had been sexually abused in childhood, and that repressed traumatic memories of this abuse could be recovered using hypnotherapy. At the same time, McNally documents, “child welfare workers were claiming to have discovered widespread current abuse of children in daycare centers” (7). These developments led to many lawsuits and care home sackings. In response, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) was set up in 1992 by a group of accused parents. This organisation argued, with backing from scientists in the field, “that therapeutic techniques [including hypnosis] designed to recover hidden memories of trauma often result in the inadvertent creation of psychologically compelling but false memories of abuse” (14-15). Many of those States of America that had changed the statute of limitations to allow for memories from childhood being cited decades later in court now reversed their decisions, while some patients sued their therapists for malpractice. Nevertheless therapists who believed in the importance of recovering repressed memories of trauma fought back, arguing that the FMSF wanted to “buttress the forces of patriarchy and silence the voices of survivors” (18). They also claimed that there was no evidence that false memories could be created during therapy. 40

McNally documents a related incident that illustrates further how political trauma has become. In 1998, an article5 published in a respected psychological journal, which meta-analysed data regarding childhood sexual experiences, concluded that these experiences rarely predicted poor adjustment or other problems in adult life: “Lasting psychological harm was the exception, not the rule” (McNally 23). The United States Congress acted to condemn the article, gaining the support of the academic hierarchy. Unsurprisingly, “[m]any psychologists were outraged that leaders of the American Psychological Association had capitulated to political pressure” (24), and worried that academic freedom and scientific method were under threat. As McNally notes: “In addition to highlighting the hazards of conducting politically controversial research, this incident illustrated just how explosive the topic of trauma had become in American society” (25).

These political issues surrounding trauma stem in part from differing interpretations of the clinical definition of PTSD. As noted above, the first official codification of the condition was in the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (1980). Perhaps reflecting its origins in post-Vietnam protests, which emphasised the particular horrors of that war, this definition specified that for an event to be sufficiently traumatic to give rise to a diagnosis of PTSD, it must be “outside the range of usual human experience” (qtd. in Caruth 3). However, subsequent epidemiological studies found that relatively common events like rape and road accidents – very much within the range of usual human experience – also often lead to PTSD. Consequently, the fourth edition of the ASA’s Manual in 1994 (DSM-IV) removed this clause. Instead of “outside the range”, the Manual and other textbooks now emphasize the “extreme” or “overwhelming” nature of trauma. “The essential feature of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder”, the ASA’s definition begins, “is the development of characteristic symptoms following exposure to an extreme traumatic stressor” (DSM-IV-TR 463) .6 Similarly, the Concise Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry (COTP) notes that “usually the event is so intense as to be overwhelming” (90), while Elsevier’s Textbook of Psychiatry (ToP) says that PTSD arises “from the overwhelming and overloading of normal emotional processing” (223). This overwhelming extremity

5 Rind, B., P. Tromovitch, and R. Bauserman. “A meta-analytic examination of assumed properties of child sexual abuse using college samples.” Psychological Bulletin 124 (1998): 22-53. 6 To bridge the gap between the 1994 text and a projected fifth edition in 2012, the ASA issued a ‘Text Revision’ (DSM-IV-TR) in 2000. It is this version to which my pagination refers. 41 must involve “direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or threatened death or serious injury, or other threat to one’s physical integrity”, or, equally, “witnessing” such an event, or even merely “learning about” its happening to a loved one (DSM-IV-TR 463). Events that may trigger PTSD include

military combat, violent personal assault (sexual assault, physical attack, robbery, mugging), being kidnapped, being taken hostage, terrorist attack, torture, incarceration as a prisoner of war or in a concentration camp, natural or manmade disasters, severe automobile accidents, or being diagnosed with a life- threatening illness. (DSM-IV-TR 463-4)

This wide range of experience problematizes the application of clinical PTSD to other discourses. For example, trauma is often used as a framework to describe the experience of the Holocaust. But to many, any kind of relativization of this event is anathema, let alone the comparison with being mugged, and indeed it is difficult to see what factors the two experiences have in common outside very narrow clinical criteria. If, then, this comparison is invalid, the concept of trauma may be an inappropriate model with which to interrogate the Holocaust.

However, for theorists of trauma, it is not so much the event itself as the memory of that event that is of central concern. As Leys points out, for the purposes of trauma studies, PTSD is “fundamentally a disorder of memory” (2). This focus arises from the fact that sufferers from PTSD are, typically, haunted by intrusive and repetitive memories of their trauma. Occasionally this includes a strange experience whereby the past event is felt to be still somehow happening in the present:

In rare instances, the person experiences dissociative states that last from a few seconds to several hours, or even days, during which components of the event are relived and the person behaves as though experiencing the event at that moment (Criterion B3). These episodes, often referred to as ‘flashbacks’, are typically brief but can be associated with prolonged distress and heightened arousal. (DSM-IV-TR 464)

Clinicians have explained this phenomenon with reference to ideas of “narrative” and “autobiographical” memory, which is thought to be disrupted by traumatic events. The New Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry (NOTP) describes this line of diagnostic thinking: 42

PTSD patients have relatively poor intentional recall of the traumatic event. Their narratives of the event tend to be fragmented and disorganized. With successful treatment, the narratives become elaborated and organized. These observations have led to the hypothesis that insufficient elaboration of the event and its meaning leads to the re-experiencing symptoms of PTSD. Autobiographical memories are normally organized in a way that prevents triggering of very vivid and emotional re-experiencing of an event. Recall is driven by themes and personal time periods, and it is relatively abstract. Ehlers and Clark suggested that re-experiencing in PTSD occurs because the trauma memory is inadequately linked to its context in time, place, and other autobiographical memories. Stimuli that resemble those present during the traumatic event can thus trigger vivid memories and strong emotional responses that are experienced as if the event was happening right now. (764)

Various treatments have been suggested for this dissociative state, including drugs, hypnotherapy, and Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT). CBT involves exposing the patient to the source or site of the trauma, both literally and by way of the imagination. This “repeated reliving of the event helps [the patient] to create an organised memory and facilitates the distinction that intrusive thoughts and images are memories rather than something happening right now” (NOTP 767).

However, the most popular treatment approach is referred to variously by the textbooks as “talking cure”, “working through” or “testimony”. In a typical formulation, it involves going over the “trauma story” in order “to rehearse the trauma and reawaken associated emotions”, with the aim of achieving “habituation” to them (ToP 224). Descended from Freudian psychoanalysis, this process of working-through requires the presence of a listener or therapist. Dori Laub, a Holocaust survivor, psychotherapist and co-founder of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, takes this theory to its extreme in his contributions to Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992). In his chapter “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening”, Laub argues that as a listener to Holocaust survivors, he is “the enabler of testimony” (58), and that the act of uncovering traumatic memory is “a journey the survivor cannot traverse or return from alone” (59). For Laub, this process is not one of remembering, but of discovery: “Knowledge in the testimony is [. . .] not simply a factual given that is reproduced and replicated by the testifier, but a genuine advent, an event in its own right” (62). Laub accounts for this radical epistemology with a hypothesis about the way the brain deals with traumatic events. Trauma, he asserts, is “a record that has yet to be made. Massive trauma 43 precludes its registration; the observing and recording mechanisms of the human mind are temporarily knocked out, malfunction” (57). Laub’s theory suggests that the explanation for traumatic “flashbacks” is that the mind is unable to cope with certain experiences, fails to “register” them as memories, and instead confronts the survivor with a repeat of the experience that can only be transformed into a memory through the act of testimony. Traumatic flashbacks, in this analysis, are hardly memories at all, at least in the usual sense of temporally mediated recollections. Rather, they are instances of the literal return of the event itself.

This view is shared by Bessel A. van der Kolk, a clinical psychologist whose writings on trauma in the early 1990s have proved highly influential. Kolk’s theories are drawn from his study of the previously largely forgotten nineteenth century psychotherapist Pierre Janet. Janet made a distinction between “narrative memory” and “automatic synthesis” or “habit memory” (nowadays usually known as “implicit memory”). While we share habit memory with animals, narrative memory is uniquely human. Janet thought that extreme experiences resist “integration” into narrative memory, “which causes the memory of these experiences to be stored differently and not be available for retrieval under ordinary conditions; it becomes dissociated from conscious awareness and voluntary control” (van der Kolk, “Intrusive Past” 160). Kolk claims that as a result of this dissociation, traumatic memories are not subject to the usual process of distortion and inaccuracy over time, nor are they contaminated by subjective meaning, re- interpretation, or elaboration. Instead they are “engraved” on the mind, and as such represent a literal, unassailable truth about the past. Traumatic memories, the “unassimilated scraps of overwhelming experience” (176), are “inflexible and invariable” (163).

However, collecting up scraps of experience and transforming them into narrative does not necessarily require the memories to be traumatic as such. Proust’s “madeleine” is a case in point. “Mémoire involontaire” is, for Proust, the mechanism that triggers recollection of the past; voluntary or intellectual effort is always doomed to fail. Walter Benjamin notes that this involuntary memory (an adaptation of Bergson’s “mémoire pure”) refers to “only what has not been experienced explicitly and consciously, what has not happened to the subject as an experience” (157). This is reminiscent of Laub’s idea that “massive trauma precludes its registration; the observing and recording 44 mechanisms of the human mind are temporarily knocked out”, and of Kolk’s assertion that traumatic experience “becomes dissociated from conscious awareness and voluntary control”. But Proust was writing about the return of untraumatic childhood memories, which nevertheless eluded him before returning in the same powerful manner as “massive trauma” is supposed by this theory to do, before being re-integrated into his life story in the form of Á la Recherche du Temps Perdu.

To what extent, then, is involuntary memory inherently traumatic? For Cathy Caruth, trauma is central to all kinds of memory and indeed to experience in general. Caruth takes the ideas of non-registration (Laub) and undistorted truth (Kolk) into the realm of critical theory, exploring their implications for history and memory. In a widely quoted formulation from her Introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995), Caruth asserts that

the pathology cannot be defined either by the event itself – which may or may not be catastrophic, and may not traumatize everyone equally – nor can it be defined in terms of a distortion of the event, achieving its haunting power as a result of distorting personal significances attached to it. The pathology consists, rather, solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event. (4-5, emphasis in original)

For Caruth, the experience of possession is “the literal return of the event against the will of the one it inhabits”, and this essential “truth” of traumatic experience is always only experienced “belatedly” (5).

Caruth’s crucial idea of belatedness draws on two interrelated Freudian concepts: Nachträglichkeit (“deferred action”, “afterwardsness”) and latency. The idea of latency is partly based on PTSD symptomatology. Clinical psychologists have noted that there is often a delay, sometimes of quite significant length, between shocking event and traumatic symptom. This has led to the creation of a sub-category in DSM-IV, “With Delayed Onset”, which is reserved for patients whose symptoms appear more than six months after the event. According to the New Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry, this “is found in a minority (11 per cent or less) of the cases” (765). Nevertheless it has proved highly suggestive for Caruth, who has extended it through her idea of “belated” personal 45 trauma into the realm of history, arguing that events only gain their force from the temporal delay with which they are experienced:

The historical power of the trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all. [. . .]. For history to be a history of a trauma means that it is referential precisely to the extent that it is not fully perceived as it occurs; or to put it somewhat differently, that a history can only be grasped in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence. (8)

For this argument Caruth relies on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1939), a text whose importance she argues has been (traumatically?) forgotten. In this, his last major work, Freud attempted to rewrite the history of the Jewish people in terms of traumatic latency. He argued that the source of Jewish monotheism is the hitherto concealed truth that Moses was an Egyptian, one who became influenced by the monotheistic “Aton” religion that was favoured by a short-lived Pharaoh. After leading the Exodus, Freud hypothesizes, Moses was eventually murdered in a revolt. However, the memory of his leadership and his monotheistic ideas resurfaced generations later, just as the descendants of Moses’ Jews were accepting Jahve as their God:

The religion of Moses [. . .] had not perished. A sort of memory of it had survived, obscured and distorted [. . .]. It was this tradition of a great past that continued to exert its effect from the background; it slowly attained more and more power over the minds of the people, and at last succeeded in changing the God Jahve into the God of Moses and in bringing again to life the abandoned religion Moses had instituted centuries ago. (196)

In order to back up this revolutionary claim, Freud proposes a psychological analogy that harks back to the link between trauma and railway accidents first made eighty years earlier:

It may happen that someone gets away from, apparently unharmed, the spot where he has suffered a shocking accident, for instance a train collision. In the course of the following weeks, however, he develops a series of grave psychical and motor symptoms, which one can ascribe only to his shock or whatever else happened at the time of the accident. He has developed a “traumatic neurosis”. This appears quite incomprehensible and is therefore a novel fact. The time that elapsed between the accident and the first appearance of the symptoms is called the “incubation period”, a transparent allusion to the pathology of infectious disease. As an afterthought we observe that – in spite of the fundamental difference in the two cases, the problem of the traumatic neurosis and that of 46

Jewish Monotheism – there is a correspondence in one point. It is the feature which one might term latency. There are the best grounds for thinking that in the history of the Jewish religion there is a long period – after the breaking away from the Moses religion – during which no trace is to be found of the monotheistic idea, the condemnation of ceremonial and the emphasis on the ethical side. Thus we are prepared for the possibility that the solution of our problem is to be sought in a special psychological situation. (109-10)

Freud goes on to reject this analogy as inadequate to explain his monotheism hypothesis, instead falling back on his abiding interest in childhood neuroses. In this he alludes to the more complex idea of Nachträglichkeit. Anne Whitehead explains how Nachträglichkeit informs Caruth’s thought:

For Freud, the concept refers to the ways in which certain experiences, impressions and memory traces are revised at a later date in order to correspond with fresh experiences or with the attainment of a new stage of development. Freud’s conception involves a radical rethinking of the causality and temporality of memory. The traumatic incident is not fully acknowledged at the time that it occurs and only becomes an event at some later point of intense emotional crisis. Caruth’s understanding of trauma reworks “deferred action” as belatedness and models itself on Freud’s conception of the non-linear temporal relation to the past. (6)

However, this interpretation of Nachträglichkeit is arguably a distortion of Freud’s meaning. Whitehead and Caruth’s account posits the occurrence of an initial “traumatic incident”, but for Freud, the trauma arises rather through the connection between two separate moments in time. As Leys explains, in Freud’s conception of Nachträglichkeit,

trauma was constituted by a relationship between two events or experiences – a first event that was not necessarily traumatic because it came too early in the child’s development to be understood and assimilated, and a second event that also was not inherently traumatic but that triggered a memory of the first event that only then was given traumatic meaning and hence repressed. (20)

This is rather different from the idea of belated possession by traumatic memories. Leys criticizes Caruth for selective quoting of Freud to construct new meaning from his ideas. For Leys, Caruth’s interpretation of Nachträglichkeit is “stripped of the idea of the retroactive conferral of meaning on past sexual experiences and reduced instead to the idea of literal if belated repetition of the traumatic event” (270-1). 47

This, I would argue, results from Caruth’s reliance on Kolk’s theory of the literal truth of “flashback” traumatic memories. As discussed above, Kolk asserts that traumatic events are not remembered in the usual way, but instead are dissociated from normal thought, and return “intrusively” of their own accord. In Remembering Trauma, McNally seeks to question this entire frame of reference, which relies on twin assumptions of dissociation and forgetting. Synthesizing clinical psychology, cognitive neuroscience and developmental psychology, McNally makes three counter-assertions to the orthodoxy of trauma:

First, people remember horrific experiences all too well. Victims are seldom incapable of remembering their trauma. Second, people sometimes do not think about disturbing events for long periods of time, only to be reminded of them later. However, events that are experienced as overwhelmingly traumatic at the time of their occurrence rarely slip from awareness. Third, there is no reason to postulate a special mechanism of repression or dissociation to explain why people may not think about disturbing experiences for long periods. A failure to think about something does not entail an inability to remember it (amnesia). (2)

This argument implicitly challenges the Janetian idea that traumatic memories are “stored” differently from other recollections. Moreover, McNally’s criticism undermines the central concept of dissociation, notwithstanding its appearance in psychiatric textbooks. The field, it would seem, is far from unified.

A further problem of Kolk’s argument is his reliance on Janet’s concept of “narrative memory”. Janet considered remembering to be a “creative act” (qtd. in van der Kolk, “Pierre Janet” 368) in which we assemble “the chapters in our personal history” during an “action of telling a story” (qtd. in van der Kolk, “Intrusive Past” 176). This argument assumes a linear temporality to memory, which has been criticized by, for example, the philosopher Ian Hacking. In Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (1995), Hacking asserts that memory is in fact composed of images and scenes, and uses this to challenge the view that “flashbacks” are any different from other recollections:

[. . .] those who describe remembering as narrative often intend to undercut any privilege of memory as a means of getting at the truth about the past. But in fact they create a space for another kind of memory, a special kind of memory, which is then, by its advocates, given special rights. My approach says that their logical error begins when one identifies remembering with narration. That 48

makes a flashback something whose very nature is different from other memory. But if recollection is to be compared to thinking of scenes and episodes (and describing or narrating them on occasion), then it is not intrinsically different from other remembering. There is no reason to believe that the flashback experience is better at getting at the unvarnished truth than any other type of remembering. (253)

This debate between image and narration points to the possible connection between photography and memory. Freud often used the photographic process as an analogy for the workings of memory, and of the psyche in general. In Moses and Monotheism, for instance, he compared childhood memories that resurface in later life to forgotten, undeveloped photographs that can still be turned into prints years later (198-9). J. J. Long summarizes the results of this line of thought for contemporary trauma theorists: “The psychic processes by which the past is remembered can thus be seen as somehow duplicating the process of photography [and] the process of photography corresponds to the sudden recall of buried memories after a period of latency” (126). Stefanie Harris, applying Kolk’s view of traumatic memory, argues that the “discontinuous temporal structure” of trauma may also be applied to photographs, which represent an “arrested” instant in time that lacks the continuity of moving pictures (387). Ulrich Baer echoes this and, adding the Laub idea of non-registration, argues that, like the “puzzlingly accurate imprinting on the mind of an overwhelming reality” found in trauma, photography provides a “mechanically recorded instant that was not necessarily registered by the subject’s own consciousness” (8). However, this line of thinking, while potentially productive for the study of photography, is less helpful in explaining how memory works. Neurological science has moved on since Freud’s hypothetical metaphors, and would be unlikely to compare the simple mechanics of a camera with the complexities of the human brain.

Yet another problem with the distinction between “flashbacks” and other types of memory lies in its therapeutic aspect. Kolk argues that Janet’s purpose in defining narrative memory was to enable those suffering dissociative states to re-integrate their intrusive memories and thereby achieve psychic health. However, Leys contends that this interpretation relies on a highly selective reading of Janet. She shows that the apparent desire to convert “traumatic memory” into “narrative memory” is contradicted in other papers by Janet which instead advocate “excision”, “acceptation” and “resignation”. Indeed, Leys interprets Janet’s corpus as emphasizing not the healing of 49 trauma but its forgetting. She argues that “for Janet, narrated recollection was insufficient for the cure. A supplementary action was required, one that involved a process of “liquidation” that, terminologically, sounded suspiciously like “exorcism” or “forgetting” (116).

The contradictions of Janet’s work are, Leys argues, echoed throughout the history of therapeutic approaches to trauma. For Leys, notions of trauma have always been, and continue to be, inherently unstable, owing to a constant oscillation between “mimetic” and “anti-mimetic” approaches. The mimetic view of trauma, she explains, assumes the testifying victim to have an element of unreliability, because his or her memory is a hypnotic imitation or process of “acting out”. Meanwhile the antimimetic school (exemplified by Kolk and Caruth) imagines the speaker as an aloof spectator to their traumatic memory who can reliably represent it as a literal historic truth, uncontaminated by subjectivity or identification with any perpetrator. Leys asserts that while most theorists of trauma have attempted to advocate one of these over the other, and in some cases, such as with Freud, moved between them during their career, the two modes are inextricable from each other (35-40).

Leys’ book includes sustained criticism of the work of Caruth, especially for the latter’s equation of trauma with literal truth. Leys’ attack has elicited a furious response from Shoshana Felman in an extended footnote from her 2002 book The Juridical Unconscious. Felman broadly attacks Leys’ analysis as being derivative and reductive. More interestingly, Felman reveals a quasi-mystical belief in the radical unknowability of trauma. She argues that Leys’ opposition between mimesis and anti-mimesis “reduces the surprise and the unknown of trauma to the (purely academic) known. It extrapolates in fact from the complexity and from the foreignness of the unconscious an estheticizing and familiarizing terminology of consciousness” (178 n.3). Felman’s underlying point is that trauma is inherently resistant to the sort of “moralizing” and “normalizing” (180 n.3) attempted by Leys. Felman talks of “the radicality of trauma itself – the way in which (precisely) the event of trauma destabilizes the security of knowledge and strikes at the foundation of the institutional prerogatives of what is known” (181 n.3). Leys, according to Felman, “in principle denies the consequences by which trauma refuses to be pigeonholed and fundamentally subverts our frames of 50 reference” (181 n.3). Trauma is “the surprise and the unknown” (178 n.3), a “bewildering phenomenon” (182 n.3) that can never be fully explained.

This argument points to a central contradiction in trauma theory between, on the one hand, the Janetian emphasis on re-integrating the trauma into narrative memory, which leads in the work of Laub and Kolk to the possibility of healing through reclaiming the truth, and on the other, trauma’s essential incomprehensibility and inaccessibility, as asserted by Felman and Caruth, whose work is built on the unstable foundations of the first group. Literality and incomprehensibility are, I would argue, incompatible concepts. The work of Caruth exemplifies this inherent contradiction, in particular her comments on testimony. Though she believes in the “truth” of traumatic memory, Caruth does not favour the healing through talking/narrativization approach as it may interfere with its sanctity. Because “trauma [. . .] evoke[s] the difficult truth of a history that is constituted by the very incomprehensibility of its occurrence”, the flashback memory experienced by the survivor conveys both “the truth of the event, and the truth of its incomprehensibility”, leading to a dilemma of sacrilege in which “talking it out” in order to effect a cure will lose the memory’s specificity and precision, the “force of its affront to understanding” (153-4, emphasis in original). Caruth cites Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah as an example of how to get around this problem, noting the film- maker’s avowed determination not to understand, only listen. “The attempt to gain access to a traumatic history, then, is also the project of listening beyond the pathology of individual suffering, to the reality of a history that in its crises can only be perceived in unassimilable forms” (156). Caruth, like Felman, thus paradoxically argues that trauma is simultaneously incomprehensible and the key to “gain[ing] access” to the past.

Such approaches have been criticized by Dominick LaCapra as tending towards the traumatic sublime. Referring to the passage quoted above, in which Caruth warns against sacrilegiously diluting the force of the trauma, LaCapra writes: “Caruth here seems dangerously close to conflating absence (of absolute foundations and total meaning or knowledge) with loss and even sacralizing, or making sublime, the compulsive repetition of acting-out of a traumatic past” (History 121). This argument is based on LaCapra’s important distinctions between absence and loss, and between structural and historical trauma. Losses, he points out, are distinct and factual, while 51 absence is more generalized and tends towards the mythical or sublime. Losses occur in actual historical trauma, such as, for example, the Holocaust, while absence corresponds to structural trauma, as with every child’s separation from the womb and mother. Confusion between the two has consequences both for the individual and for society:

When absence and loss are conflated, melancholic paralysis or manic agitation may set in, and the significance or force of particular historical losses (for example, those of apartheid or the Shoah) may be obfuscated or rashly generalised. As a consequence one encounters the dubious ideas that everyone (including perpetrators or collaborators) is a victim, that all history is trauma, or that we all share a pathological public sphere or a ‘wound culture’. (Writing 64)

This latter phrase originates in Mark Seltzer’s article about public fascination with serial killers, “Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere” (1997). Seltzer defines wound culture as “the public fascination with torn and opened bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound” (3) which leads to an over-identification with suffering. The idea of all history being trauma, meanwhile, LaCapra attributes mainly to Caruth and her assertion that “a history can only be grasped in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence”. Against this tendency to conflate absence and loss, LaCapra urges “working-through”. This concept, though Freudian and therapeutic in origin, means for LaCapra not a process of healing or closure but more of acknowledging the pain of the past and turning with hope towards the future. Working-through thus “counteracts the tendency to sacralize trauma or to convert it into a founding or sublime event – a traumatic sublime or transfigured moment of blank insight and revelatory abjection” (History 123).

Another version of the traumatic sublime relates to the Lacanian view of child development. Roth and Salas, in Disturbing Remains: Memory, History, and Crisis in the Twentieth Century (2001), describe this tendency: “For some, trauma is a basic feature of consciousness. Awakening to the real is itself said to be traumatic and thus to undermine the unity and stability of the individual subject” (2). Such a view has political consequences. Edkins, for example, adapts this version of trauma – the irruption of the real into the symbolic order – into a call for political action, thereby sacralizing traumatic events as moments not of abjection but of “revelation” (5). For Edkins, trauma alone allows us to glimpse the real and break out of the symbolic order, from the linear time of the “political” into the “trauma time” of active “politics” (15). 52

However, Edkins’ thesis, like Caruth’s, again suggests the incompatibility of notions of narrativization of traumatic memory with its supposed resistance to comprehension. This is seen in her opposition to the normalization of trauma that occurs in, for example, state-led memorialization projects, as these involve a “re-inscription into linear narratives [that] generally depoliticises” (15). Adopting phrases from Slavoj Žižek’s For They Know Not What They Do (1991), she argues that

there is an alternative, that of encircling the trauma. We cannot try to address the trauma directly without risking its gentrification. We cannot remember it as something that took place in time, because this would neutralise it. All we can do is “to encircle again and again the site” of the trauma, “to mark it in its very impossibility”. (15)

Žižek’s word “impossibility” may take its place alongside Felman’s “bewildering”, “surpris[ing]” and “unknown”, and Caruth’s “incomprehensibility” and “unassimab[ility]”, in the adjectival pantheon of trauma. That this lexicon resembles the rhetoric of the Holocaust, which as my Introduction noted includes notions of the “incomprehensible”, “incommensurable”, and “ineffable”, is not surprising, given that the Holocaust has become the quintessential traumatic event of recent history. Moreover, these negative descriptions fundamentally clash with the simultaneously held view that traumatic memories represent a positive and literal truth about the past.

A way out of this dead end, I would argue, is to move beyond problematic notions of literality. We may grant the overwhelming power and importance of traumatic symptoms in war veterans, sexual abuse victims and Holocaust survivors without having to assume the unimpeachable accuracy of their memories. Traumatic events may be relived time and again by survivors, whether “dissociatively” or not, but it does not follow that their memories are any more reliable than those of non-victims. Indeed, Laub himself cites the example of an Auschwitz survivor with an inaccurate memory of the failed rebellion there. This woman remembered four chimneys being set ablaze, whereas historical research suggests that it was only one. For Laub this merely highlights the unhelpfulness of empirical views of truth when confronted with the overwhelming truth of traumatic memory, an argument considered further in Chapter 3 of the present study. For now, it will be apparent how such examples problematize any notion of literal verisimilitude of recall by victims of traumatic events. Indeed, in their 53

Introduction to Trauma and Memory (1996), editors Williams and Banyard cite a growing body of evidence that proves these memories to be subject to the same distortion as any other, despite the evidence that traumatic memory does indeed work differently, showing that these facts are not inherently incompatible:

There is also a profusion of research on suggestibility and memory that shows that memory is reconstructive and imperfect, that memory can be influenced and distorted, that confabulation can occur to fill in memory gaps, and that subjects can be persuaded to believe they heard, saw, or experienced events that they did not. Inaccurate memories can be strongly believed and convincingly described. A number of studies have been conducted to assess directly the implantation of memories for events that would be traumatic had they occurred [. . .]. [. . .] most studies indicate that 15% to 25% of individuals will, after several attempts, report memories for fictitious events. (xii)

This may seem an artificial exercise, but a similarly problematic result occurs in the normal run of treatment for trauma. As Leys notes: “The hypnotic suggestibility of the victim of dissociation or PTSD makes the patient’s testimony about the historical truth of the traumatic origin inherently suspect owing to the potential for hypnotic confabulation and ‘false memories’” (38).

Nevertheless, the idea of the unimpeachable truth of traumatic memories persists. One reason for this is the desire for justice and retribution. In contemporary society, it seems, perpetrators must be punished, “truth and reconciliation” must be achieved, and events like the Holocaust must be memorialized. If memories are seen to be unreliable, leading to distortion and forgetting, such projects become harder to sustain. Moreover, they also rely on the assumption that trauma can account for collective as well as individual experience. Herman, for example, makes an explicit link between personal and community trauma, arguing that there is a correspondence between the repression of painful memories by individuals and society’s avoidance of unpalatable facts: “The knowledge of horrible events periodically intrudes into public awareness, but is rarely retained for long. Denial, repression, and dissociation operate on a social as well as an individual level” (2). Thus, for Herman: “Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims” (1). However, this can only be achieved if the truthful memory is available for retrieval, a point which does not necessarily follow, troubling though this is for those who rightly wish to punish perpetrators for their crimes. 54

Another example of research into collective trauma motivated by a desire for political justice is Kai Erikson’s analysis of the reaction of small communities to local disasters, such as floods and industrial gas leaks. Such groups, Erikson argues, may be said to be traumatized in two ways. First, they may suffer “damage to the tissues that hold human groups intact”. Second, they may experience the “creation of social climates, communal moods, that come to dominate a group’s spirit” (190). Communities may, as a result, develop a different worldview in that they no longer screen out the dangers around them, living in a perpetual state of anxiety and fear.

A more theoretical example of the transference of trauma from the individual to the collective sphere is Andreas Huyssen’s psychoanalysis of the entire German nation in his chapter “Rewritings and New Beginnings” from Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (2003). Huyssen asserts that post-war German society has suffered a multi-layered trauma consisting of the humiliation of total defeat, Holocaust guilt, expulsion from the East, and the aftermath of destruction caused by Allied bombardment. This trauma, Huyssen argues, has manifested itself as a “repetitive obsession” with “new beginnings”. In 1945, 1968 and 1990, German society reverberated with ideas of “Neuanfänge [fresh start], Nullpunke [zero point], tabula rasa [clean slate], Wendepunkte [turning point]” (144). Huyssen suggests that this is a result of “the double-edged desire simultaneously to remember and to avoid the past” (145-6). He goes on: “All survivors of traumatic experiences face the difficult task of new beginnings. But the tension between traumatic symptom and new beginning will necessarily remain unresolved, generating ever new attempts at resolution” (151). Here Huyssen draws on the orthodox psychoanalytical observation that people who fail to work through their trauma are liable to suffer re-experiencing symptoms after a period of latency, the goal of therapy being to resolve this and stop the repetition. This argument rests on the assumption that a clinical model may be extended to the consciousness of an entire nation, which for Huyssen is revealed not just by socio- political events but also by the literature that nation produces. Indeed, it is from post- war German literature that Huyssen draws much of his evidence: “Like the public culture from which postwar German literature emerged and that it shaped in turn, this literature lives off repetitions, reinscriptions, and rewritings that make any historical 55 account of postwar literary developments as a stable progression through the decades inherently problematic” (156).

Huyssen thus moves from psychoanalysis to socio-historical theory, and thence to literature. But is literature explicable through the concept of trauma? Are the movements of literary history attributable to a collective version of traumatic “flashbacks” to an unassimilated memory of the past? Does this somehow explain the fact and nature of contemporary Holocaust narratives? What does this say about the role of the author in relation to the past, especially if he or she took no part in that past? What is the relationship between writing and trauma? These are difficult questions, and ones for which only provisional answers may be offered within the scope of the present study. Nevertheless, I wish to suggest that the paradoxes, contradictions and uncertainties of trauma theory, as detailed above, render any use of that theory to explain the workings of literature inherently problematic.

An obvious example of the inapplicability of certain views of traumatic memory to literature is the case of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s false Holocaust memoir Fragments. This affair graphically shows how traumatic memory does not always correspond to truth. Wilkomirski is by all accounts genuinely traumatized by his memories of being a child in Nazi concentration camps, yet these recollections have been proved to be false. In this instance, traumatic memory has led to the production of a narrative that is an inherently deceptive work of fiction (as I argue in Chapter 3 of the present study). Of course, this is a rare case, and other contemporary Holocaust narratives do not suffer from the same peculiar set of circumstances. In an article on literature and Holocaust remembrance, Nicola King explores “the ways in which fiction might be a ‘site of memory’ as the generation who directly experienced it begins to die out” (94). However, as King notes, the contemporary novelist inhabits a problematic position of witness after the event. This may be resolved with reference to a model in which the author takes on a sense of “responsibility” akin to “the task of the therapist” (97) by restoring the lost or fractured memories of survivors (real or imagined) to narrative coherence. This in turn corresponds with the Janetian view of trauma in memory as personal life story. As Kolk writes, “Traumatic memories are the unassimilated scraps of overwhelming experiences, which need to be integrated with existing mental schemes, and be transformed into narrative language” (“Intrusive” 176). If this is so, 56 then to narrate the memory of traumatic events in, for example, a novel, may, by extension, have some kind of curative value. Perhaps there is a parallel to be drawn between, on the one hand, the literary triad of writer, reader and subject, and on the other, the therapeutic situation of psychiatrist, patient and trauma.

Such a comparison is certainly implied in the work of Dori Laub. Laub asserts that when he interviews survivors, decades after the event, they are in some sense bearing witness to the event for the first time. This is because the Nazis “brutally imposed upon the victims a delusional ideology whose grandiose coercive pressure totally excluded and eliminated the possibility of an unviolated, unencumbered, and thus sane, point of reference in the witness” (“Event” 81). Laub thus extends his assertion that “massive trauma precludes its registration” to argue that the Holocaust was, as the title of his chapter has it, “An Event Without a Witness”. However, he suggests that through the quasi-therapeutic situation of the video interview, which preserves survivor memory in the archive, a belated form of witness may be achieved – one which, moreover, neatly corresponds to the concept of latency:

It is not by chance that these testimonies – even if they were engendered during the event – become receivable only today; it is not by chance that it is only now, belatedly, that the event begins to be historically grasped and seen. I wish to emphasize this historical gap which the event created in the collective witnessing. This emphasis does not invalidate in any way the power and the value of the individual testimonies, but it underscores the fact that these testimonies were not transmittable, and integratable, at the time. (84, emphasis in original)

Thus not only were the traumatic events unassimilable at the time, they could not have been “transmitted” to others until the latency period had elapsed. Laub alleges that no- one spoke about the Holocaust in the immediate post-war period, a silence that, he argues, was partly the result of the continuing delusional sensibility imposed by the Nazis on its victims. It is only now, with the help of people such as himself, that witness and healing may begin.

This may seem a highly contentious argument, relying on unverified hypotheses about what people did or did not do or say in the post-war world. But Laub goes even further, arguing, by way of analogy with the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, that members 57 of the present generation are “innocent children” who can see through the Nazi-imposed delusion, because they are “removed enough from the experience to begin to ask questions” (83). This opposition between survivors and later generations appears highly problematic, especially considering that Laub, as a survivor himself, appears to be representing both groups. However, it does articulate a view that might help to justify certain forms of Holocaust representation. Could the analogy be extended to contemporary writers who have taken as their subject the traumas of the twentieth century? Are writers born after World War II “innocent children” with a clearer perspective on events than those who lived through them? This would certainly invert the orthodoxy that testimonial literature has more value than fiction. I would argue, however, that this genre question is less important than the beliefs about traumatic memory that authors carry with them when writing their narratives. As this chapter has attempted to show, these beliefs may rest on shaky foundations. The concept of trauma, I have argued, is politically determined, clinically controversial, and theoretically confused in its tendency towards sublimating horrific experiences, rewriting older texts to its own ends, and making contradictory claims about truthfulness and incomprehensibility. Writers of contemporary Holocaust narratives may be tempted to believe in the literal and unmediated truth of traumatic memories, or even in their untouchable sublimity, as a result of a desire to respect the suffering of victims and survivors, but without an objective view that includes truth-testing this attitude of respect risks becoming over-identification. In the next chapter of the present study I suggest that a version of empathy, developed from the work of LaCapra, may explain how some texts, such as those by Sebald and Foer, work to avert this difficulty, through a gesture which acknowledges the potential for identification while seeking nevertheless to maintain a level of objective distance. 58

Chapter 2

Resolving the problems of identification: LaCapra, Gadamer, self-reflexivity and transgenerational empathy

When dealing with traumatic events like the Holocaust, which touch us and arouse our sympathy, a degree of identification with victims is perhaps inevitable. However, this seems inappropriate and ethically dubious, given the gulf between our experience and theirs. Nevertheless, instead of repudiating this instinct, or pretending that it does not exist, it may be more productive to acknowledge and harness such feelings while ensuring that they are tempered by an element of objective distance. One way to do this is to draw a distinction between simple identification and the more complex gesture of empathy. Such is the view of Dominick LaCapra, who argues that “empathic unsettlement” (Writing 78) is necessary when approaching the Holocaust from the position of outsider. Empathy is a key term for LaCapra, who defines it as “an affective relation, rapport, or bond with the other recognized and respected as other” (Writing 212-3). While LaCapra is chiefly concerned with the role of the historian, this chapter will develop his ideas to show how they may be productively applied to contemporary Holocaust narratives. I argue that the ethical and epistemological problems of identification may be resolved to an extent through what I call “transgenerational empathy”, an approach to the past that is self-reflexive, draws on ideas of time, memory and generations, and moves both towards and away from the victims of the past in a simultaneous gesture of proximity and distance. My approach also situates LaCaprian empathy in the space opened up by Gadamer’s concept of the “fusion of horizons” between past and present. In later chapters I show how transgenerational empathy corresponds to an extent with the narrative strategies employed by W. G. Sebald and Jonathan Safran Foer.

Empathy has a dual structure: it is the ability simultaneously to share and understand the feelings of another. As such, its modern meaning is entirely different from that of sympathy, which connotes feelings of pity or sorrow for another’s misfortune. Later in this chapter, I trace the history of this distinction, as it helps explain the development of empathy in various discourses from the eighteenth century onwards. First, however, I wish to make a crucial distinction between empathy and identification. In a very broad 59 sense, identification may be considered to correspond to the “shared feelings” aspect of empathy, while lacking the other element of understanding. In psychoanalytic theory, identification refers to the process by which a patient may unconsciously incorporate attributes of another person into his or her personality, while in over-identification an excessive level of this incorporation leads to the denigration of the patient’s individuality or subjectivity. Identification, then, is best understood as a pathological condition or tendency with potentially undesirable results (though as we will see, not everyone agrees that over-incorporation of the other is wrong or unhelpful).

In the field of Holocaust studies, particularly where it intersects with trauma theory, identification has emerged as a major issue. As Geoffrey Hartman noted in 1995: “The predicament [for those who consider the traumatic past] is how to acknowledge the passionate, suffering, affectional side of human nature without sympathy turning into over-identification” (“On Traumatic” 545). Such a transformation might occur, warns Hartman, if one makes the mistake of thinking about trauma as a universal experience related to loss of the Lacanian “real”. This echoes LaCapra’s warning against conflating absence with loss, as described in my last chapter. For Hartman, such ideas can lead to “a temptation to politicize the fact of trauma and to broaden, even universalize, the perspective of victimhood” (546). Beyond the warning to theorists of trauma, Hartman’s implication is clear: it is impermissible for non-victims to identify with victims, especially Holocaust victims, whose experience and suffering must not be subjected to comparison or relativization. Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, quoting the title of a poem by Karen Gershon, gives a more succinct version of this warning: “I was not there”.

However, there are degrees of not-there-ness. Hartman and Gershon are both survivors from the Kindertransport; Hilberg has spent his working life documenting and evaluating the extermination of European Jewry during the Third Reich. The point is that their relationship to the event is always an issue, always a consideration both for their working practice and for those who read and evaluate their output. The same goes, of course, for writers and readers of fictional narratives of the Holocaust. One aim of this study is to show that the more successful authors of such narratives foreground their knowledge of and engagement with this and related issues in a self-reflexive manner; indeed, this is a vital component of what I call transgenerational empathy. 60

Nevertheless, fiction arguably contains greater dangers of identification than, say, criticism or historiography. Traditionally, identification with characters or situations has been seen as crucial to the success of a story, especially from the reader’s perspective. However, this represents a narrowly realist view of fiction which is increasingly under challenge from more knowing forms of writing, sometimes gathered under the heading “postmodern”. Thus the question arises as to whether such forms resolve the problem of identification and to what extent.

Robert Eaglestone addresses this issue directly in The Holocaust and the Postmodern (2004), arguing that while fiction cannot escape the problems associated with identification, testimonial accounts can and do. He reaches this conclusion through a detailed debate about ethics and epistemology. First, he asserts that postmodern thought may represent a solution to the problem of identification, insofar as it challenges the assumptions that lead to ethically dubious attitudes to the Holocaust. These assumptions include the “metaphysics of comprehension,” which is “both the desire for and the methods by and through which Western thought, in many different ways, comprehends, seizes, or consumes what is other to it and so reduces the other to itself” (4). Identification is a key component of this process, as it “often leads to the ‘consumption’ and reduction of otherness, the assimilation of others’ experience into one’s own frameworks” (6). In the case of the Holocaust, Eaglestone argues, identification represents an illicit attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible, a danger which arises each time we are confronted with representations of the event:

We who come after the Holocaust and know about it only through representations are frequently and with authority told that it is incomprehensible. However, the representations seem to demand us to do exactly that, to comprehend it, to grasp the experience, to imagine the suffering, through identifying with those who suffered. (19)

Eaglestone’s articulation of this dilemma reveals an interesting definition of identification. He appears to conflate “comprehend”, “grasp” and “imagine” into a subset under the overall header of “identifying”. This seems a rather limiting account of the available options for the reader. Are imagining and comprehending inextricable? Must one imagine in order to comprehend? In Chapter 4 of the present study, I show how W. G. Sebald’s narratives foreground this very problem of imagining, by 61 consciously limiting its extent and imposing layers of distance. This suggests that contemplation of the other need not always lead to identification, which as I will show may be separated, to an extent, from comprehension through the application of a specific, distinctive notion of empathy. Empathy’s simultaneous gesture of sharing and understanding the feelings of others keeps the notions of identification and comprehension distinct, while also avoiding the necessity to choose between one and the other.

Eaglestone, meanwhile, goes on to identify two issues that arise from the problem of identification and representation. First, he asserts that it is not epistemologically or psychologically possible to know what it was like for real Holocaust victims or survivors; and secondly, that the seeking of such knowledge is (or should be) ethically proscribed. This idea of “illicit comprehension” (23), however, seems to contain a contradiction or paradox: if comprehension/identification is impossible, why is it necessary to warn against it? If the attempt is futile, what harm can it do? For Eaglestone, this amounts to the abstract ethical problem of “consumption” of the other. It seems that people can and do attempt to identify with others’ suffering, and Eaglestone’s aim is to limit this by establishing boundaries.

To further this aim, he defines “testimony” as a genre, one which has advantages over others, especially fiction:

Many forms of prose writing encourage identification and while testimony cannot but do this, it at the same time aims to prohibit identification, on epistemological grounds (a reader really cannot become, or become identified with, the narrator of a testimony: any such identification is an illusion) and on ethical grounds (a reader should not become identified with a narrator of a testimony, as it reduces and ‘normalizes’ or consumes the otherness of the narrator’s experience and the illusion that such an identification creates is possibly pernicious). (42-3)

Eaglestone’s assertion that “any such identification is an illusion” raises the question of the Wilkomirski affair. As I show in Chapter 3 of the present study, Binjamin Wilkomirski’s false memoir Fragments (1995) came about in part through the author’s over-identification with real others’ testimonies, which he appropriated for himself, incorporating them into his own identity. Though this is an “illusion”, it appears that it 62 is nevertheless very real to him. Put another way: one can identify with a testifier or testimony if one wants to; calling this an “illusion” does not change one’s subjective experience. To say one “should not” is another matter, and perhaps suggests that the real issue for Eaglestone is the problem of responsibility – a responsibility towards, for example, the ethical imperative to respect others’ suffering. But it is not entirely clear where the responsibility lies. On the one hand, Eaglestone argues that the testimonial form itself “rejects the pleasures of identification” (38) through its “gaps, shifts, breaks, and ruptures” (41), while on the other hand it appears that it is the way one approaches testimony that resolves the problem: “To read these texts as testimonies, to read the genre, is to refuse the identification” (40). Who has agency here – author or reader? Or the text itself?

Notwithstanding these unresolved issues, testimony is held up by Eaglestone as an ethically superior genre. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that it does not wholly reject identification:

[. . .] ‘doubleness’ is central to the genre of testimony: the texts lead to identification and away from it simultaneously. This stress between centrifugal and centripetal forces is played out, but not resolved, in the texts of testimonies and it is this that characterises the genre of testimony. (43)

For Eaglestone this “stress” can only exist in testimony, not fiction, because “the reading that fiction requires too often demands the sort of process of identification that ‘consumes’ the events” (132). Novels, he argues, tend to encourage us to identify with ethically dubious subject positions, such as perpetrator, passive victim, or bystander, leading to a “tension – between the demand of fiction that we identify and the demand of the Holocaust that we cannot and should not – that unbalances even the most subtle of [. . .] novels” (132). Eaglestone’s opposition of the categories “fiction” and “testimony” appears to elide the possibility that fictionalization is present in all forms of writing, including (perhaps especially) autobiographical forms. Moreover, his argument implicitly discounts the possibility of narratives that sit somewhere between fiction and testimony. In my chapters on Sebald and Foer, I show how certain contemporary Holocaust narratives may be put into this category, and how they enact, through transgenerational empathy, something akin to Eaglestone’s “doubleness”, through a simultaneous action of proximity and distance. Indeed, the characteristics of testimony 63 that Eaglestone describes, such as “interruptions” to a past narrative by a narrator in the present, or “disruptions in [. . .] chronology”, are characteristic of contemporary literature in general, making the distinction between genres even harder to sustain.

However, Eaglestone adds a further component to his genre of testimony. He argues that it is distinguished by “an existential uncovering or revelation” in the form of a “trace”, which is “the grounds for that which refuses comprehension (here, through identification): it is the trace of incomprehensible other, the witness” (70). Through this idea Eaglestone seeks to resolve a paradox, namely that of the critic (Eaglestone) who makes a gesture of comprehension (through writing) towards that which he has named as incomprehensible (the Holocaust). Thus Eaglestone engages with the contradiction inherent in the search for the truth of a past which is simultaneously defined as beyond reach. As I showed in my last chapter, this contradiction is at the heart of trauma theory, and has been criticized as tending towards sublimation. Indeed, Eaglestone’s characterisation of testimony as “revelation” echoes Jenny Edkins’ valorisation of the traumatic moment as the catalyst for political action. Though their meaning of the term is different, both partake of a discourse which appears to gesture towards what LaCapra has called “the tendency to sacralize trauma or to convert it into a founding or sublime event” (History in Transit 123).

Holocaust and trauma studies, then, coincide in Eaglestone’s analysis of the problem of identification. But this does not mean that all approaches grounded in those fields will reach the same conclusion. Ernst van Alphen’s thesis in Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory (1997) represents the ethical reverse to Eaglestone’s position, arguing in favour of all kinds of identification with Holocaust participants, even perpetrators. Van Alphen begins by asserting that figurative, imaginative artworks are more useful than historical or factual accounts for representing the Holocaust, as they can enable what he calls “Holocaust effects”. Drawing on trauma studies and speech-act theory, he suggests that these performative “reenactments” (presentations, not re-presentations) enable the audience to “keep in touch” with the past in an unmediated manner. “When I call something a Holocaust effect, I mean to say that we are not confronted with a representation of the Holocaust, but that we, as viewers or readers, experience directly a certain aspect of the Holocaust or of Nazism, of that which led to the Holocaust” (10). That this is a species of 64 identification is clear from van Alphen’s introductory remarks, in which he looks back to his schooldays in 1960s Holland:

[. . .] war and Holocaust narratives were dull to me, almost dulled me, as a young child because they were told in such a way that I was not allowed to have my own response to them. My response, in other words, was already culturally prescribed or narratively programmed. Fleeting, idiosyncratic identifications I might have with perpetrators instead of with victims were prohibited by the official framings, hence were impossible. The narration of this past had no ambiguities; moral positions were fixed. (2)

Thus van Alphen values the process of identification with morally dubious subject positions for its potentially productive effect rather than allowing its proscription by ethical imperatives, in a direct contradiction of Eaglestone’s attempt to limit such moves through criticism of fictional narrative. I would argue that neither extreme is the best way to approach Holocaust representation, and that transgenerational empathy may represent a middle ground that avoids the presumption of “reexperiencing” someone else’s past while nevertheless acknowledging (and tempering) such desires to commune with the dead.

The contention that one should actively seek to identify with Holocaust participants, rather than avoid or ignore such attachments, forms the subject of Emily Prager’s Eve’s Tattoo (1992). In this intriguing novel, forty-year-old New York journalist Eve gets the camp number of an anonymous Auschwitz inmate tattooed on her arm. Eve calls this woman “Eva”, embracing her as an alter-ego. She wants to memorialize the unknown victim by celebrating her life rather than her death, and take the woman into the twenty- first century by literally embodying her in the present. Each time one of her friends asks about the tattoo she invents a different life history of Eva. These biographies are composites based on Eve’s extensive reading of Holocaust witness accounts and, especially, testimonies from women in 1930s Germany. Indeed, Eve’s strange project of identification has a strong feminist agenda; she even compares Aryan brutality to more general notions of male abuse towards women. Many of the “Evas”, the subjects of her invented biographies, try to resist Nazi persecution but all fail and, in her stories, eventually become the Auschwitz victim of the photograph. 65

After her first improvised life history, Eve is pleased with the reaction of her usually frivolous friends:

Everyone had identified. For a few minutes the tattoo had jolted them from the lethe of middle-class life and they suddenly looked not sophisticated or cynical, not fed up or bored, not played-out or wired, just human, exposed, their expressions softened with an empathy they would never have acknowledged that they could feel. (29)

This passage is notable for its conflation of identification with empathy, a common confusion which I explore later in this chapter. It also alleges that identification is an antidote to ignorance. Eve herself embarks on her bizarre episode after finding out for the first time that the Holocaust did not only target Jews, and that the first victims of gas chambers were mental patients. This “one little fact opened doors in Eve’s mind that led her to getting the tattoo. Doors of identification, doors of terror, doors that led to rooms of questions she had never thought to ask, from perspectives she had never considered” (31). Thus the breaking down of religious and ethnic barriers is figured as helping identification and thus understanding, which, as in Eaglestone’s account, appear to be conflated by Eve. However, the issue is complicated by Eve’s lover Charles, who reacts violently to the tattoo. He turns out to be a Frenchman whose parents collaborated with the occupying German forces during the war, and it is only when Eve’s tattoo is removed in a freak accident that they are reconciled. Thus while Eve and her friends, who have no personal connection to the Holocaust, are alleged to benefit from her identificatory fantasies, Charles, a man with painful family secrets, refuses to join in the project. Eve’s attempts to make him “understand” by explaining the facts she gleans from Holocaust literature fall on deaf ears. Thus Prager subtly undermines the assertion of her heroine that all identification is of positive value.

Prager’s novel, which is deadpan in tone, satirizes the urge to identify experienced by those who spend too much time reading Holocaust accounts and narratives. It also highlights the way identification is not limited to psychological or affective responses. The body’s instinctive reaction to representations of others’ (painful) experience, which in Prager’s novel is allegorized as deliberate self-mutilation, is itself a species of identification that can be considered a useful aid to understanding. Such corporeal concerns underlie a startling thesis put forward by Alison Landsberg. In the context of 66 the need to find new ways of preserving Holocaust memory now that the last survivors are dying off, Landsberg asks: “is it possible for the Holocaust to become a bodily memory for those who have not lived through it?” (66) The answer for Landsberg is yes, by way of “an alternative living memory” she labels “prosthetic”:

Prosthetic memories are memories that circulate publicly, are not organically based, but are nevertheless experienced with one’s own body – by means of a wide range of cultural technologies – and as such, become part of one’s personal archive of experience, informing not only one’s subjectivity, but one’s relationship to the present and future tenses. I call these memories prosthetic, in part, because, like an artificial limb, they are actually worn by the body; these are sensuous memories produced by experience. (66)

Landsberg wants to activate these memories for the public good. She “make[s] the claim that affective power might be mobilized to have a similar kind of political potential as conceptual power” (66); that is, she sees a practical utility in the promotion of certain modes of experience. Museums in which one interacts with exhibits “might actually install in us [through transference] ‘symptoms’ or prosthetic memories through which we didn’t actually live, but [with] which we now [. . .] have a kind of experiential relationship” (82). However, there are problems with this approach. Visiting the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Landsberg reports feelings of physical distress induced by its experiential element. Then, seeing smoke, she has a sudden fantasy that she might herself be about to be gassed, leading to a visceral feeling of helplessness. This moment is argued to be helpful towards gaining understanding of the Holocaust:

To experience, if only for a flash, the way it feels to have your personhood or agency stripped away, may be the grounds for understanding or for having empathy for something totally other and cognitively unimaginable. Perhaps the experience of vulnerability might itself be a form of knowledge about the Holocaust. (85)

The first objection to this proposal would be to ask what value there is in a comparison between a minor moment of fear in a modern democracy and the experience of persecution, terror and torture at the hands of a genocidal fascist organisation. Moreover, the smoke seen by Landsberg was not intended as part of the museal experience, but was in fact a technical fault. It could have happened anywhere, for example on a subway network, so it is difficult to see what relation it has to the 67

Holocaust as such. Though Landsberg describes the experience as one of “empathy”, its misguided character makes it seem more like an irrational and overdetermined moment of identification. Indeed, the example is surprising, because Landsberg earlier gives a usefully nuanced description of what she means by empathy:

While sympathy [. . .] relies upon an essentialism of identification, empathy recognizes the alterity of identification. Empathy, then, is about the lack of identity between subjects, about negotiating distances. Empathy [. . .] is not emotional self-pitying identification with victims, but a way of both feeling for, while feeling different from, the subject of enquiry. (82)

Landsberg’s definition of empathy, then, closely coincides with my own (and LaCapra’s) in its emphasis on maintaining the alterity of the other. Yet her examples suggest that this is unlikely to be achieved through extreme bodily identifications. Further investigation into the history of meanings of identification may help to explain why this is so.

LaCapra’s definition of empathy offers a clue to this history. LaCapra has defined empathy as “a form of virtual, not vicarious, experience related to what Kaja Silverman has termed heteropathic identification, in which emotional response comes with respect for the other and the realization that the experience of the other is not one’s own” (Writing 40). Before exploring LaCapra’s ideas in detail, I wish to follow the tantalising trail he leaves regarding “heteropathic identification”, which leads back through Kaja Silverman to the early twentieth century philosopher Max Scheler.

In The Threshold of the Visible World (1996) – the text LaCapra cites – Silverman, a “psychoanalytic theorist”, is chiefly concerned with how visual artifacts can enable productive identification with “culturally disprized” (2) others. This aim depends on a sharp distinction: “It is crucial that this identification conform to an externalizing rather than internalizing logic – that we identify excorporatively rather than incorporatively, and, thereby, respect the otherness of the newly illuminated bodies” (2). Silverman explains that the “incorporative” mode corresponds to what Freud meant by identification, “the process whereby the other is interiorized as the self” (as in, for example, melancholia). In “excorporative” identification, in contrast, “the subject identifies at a distance from his or her proprioceptive self” (23). This argument rests on 68 an opposition, taken from the work of Henri Wallon, between the formation of “exteroceptive” and “proprioceptive” ego-states. Referring to infant psychological development, exteroceptive corresponds to the visual imago, or Lacan’s “mirror stage”, which leads to one’s sense of identity. The proprioceptive stage, meanwhile, is a non- visual, physical sense of one’s “own-ness” that enables one to perceive exteriority. Like Landsberg, Silverman emphasises an important corporeal element to identification. For Silverman, the ego and the body are tightly bound together: “The sensational ego is at the same time psychic and corporeal” (17). As the sensational and proprioceptive ego are one and the same for Silverman, it follows that it is through the body that she thinks one can achieve an identification that both preserves the other’s exteriority and enables us to enter that exteriority. For Silverman, it is “imperative that we learn to idealize outside the corporeal parameters of the self. [. . .] to do so would be to make possible our identification at a distance with bodies which we would otherwise phobically avoid” (37). She gives an example of trying to overcome feelings of disgust for tramps in her street, acknowledging that there is a strong element of white middle-class guilt informing her thesis.

Silverman’s central opposition between interior and exterior modes of identification is theorized through the terms “idiopathic” and “heteropathic”, coined by the early twentieth-century social philosopher Max Scheler. Silverman first used these terms in her earlier book Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992), in which idiopathic is broadly aligned with sadism and heteropathic with masochism. In The Threshold of the Visible World, as we have seen, Silverman activates the term heteropathic in relation to a radical and politicized framework of excorporative identification. “Heteropathic identification” is beginning to look far removed from Landsberg or LaCapra’s definitions of empathy, and this is not surprising when Scheler’s ideas are examined in detail.

In The Nature of Sympathy (1923), the text from which Silverman liberally quotes, Scheler pointedly rejects empathy in the form that he understood it. Defined as “feeling-into”, Scheler argues that empathy presumes that knowledge of the self precedes and is more fundamental than knowledge of others. For Scheler, the opposite is the case: we begin our lives in a universal environment of feelings before differentiating ourselves and realising our selfhood. Thus we can use our “intuition” to 69 go back to this time and draw upon a “universal grammar” (11) of feeling, and so achieve love for our fellow humans.

Scheler goes on to produce a kind of taxonomy of feelings for others. He makes a distinction between “vicariously visualised feeling and participation in feeling” (14). The experience felt in crowds or jolly public houses is a “[m]ere emotional infection” (12) which has nothing to do with real fellow-feeling; in these situations one is not sharing others’ joy, but merely cheering oneself up. Included within this category is “emotional identification”, which is “only a heightened form, a limiting case as it were, of infection” (18). Here Scheler cites an example, given by Theodor Lipps, of “aesthetic empathy” in which a spectator becomes at “one with” an acrobat at the circus. This, though, represents only a partial identification for Scheler, who goes on:

There are other cases, however, [. . .] in which such identification is undoubtedly complete; which do not merely exemplify a moment of true ‘ecstasy’, but may be of long duration, and can even become habitual throughout whole phases of life. They are of two opposite kinds: the idiopathic and the heteropathic. Thus identification can come about in one way through the total eclipse and absorption of another self by one’s own, it being thus, as it were, completely dispossessed and deprived of all rights in its conscious existence and character. It can also come about the other way, where ‘I’ (the formal subject) am so overwhelmed and hypnotically bound and fettered by the other ‘I’ (the concrete individual), that my formal status as a subject is usurped by the other’s personality, with all its characteristic aspects; in such a case, I live, not in ‘myself’, but entirely in ‘him’, the other person – (in and through him, as it were). (18-19, emphasis in original)

Heteropathic identification, then, is for Scheler an exotic and extreme psychological oddity, a mere sub-category of “infection”. The examples he gives are mostly drawn from ancient times or primitive societies, including the case of religious mystics who identify with the godhead to the extent that they believe themselves to become that god. Scheler’s view of empathy, meanwhile, is once again evident when he describes how this example of the “mysteries of antiquity” continues in a watered-down form as theatre: “Here, at last, the ecstatic identification is reduced to the level of mere symbolic empathy” (20, emphasis in original). Such distinctions, when considered alongside Scheler’s formulations (adopted by Silverman) of being “bound and fettered” and living “entirely in [. . .] the other person”, suggest that the concept of heteropathic identification is far removed from the notion of empathy intended by LaCapra. To live 70 entirely subsumed within another surely destroys the distance between self and other that distinguishes his version of empathy from simple identification. However, when one considers the vexed and confused history of the term empathy, it is perhaps not surprising that such anomalies should occur.

Empathy is as much bound up with sympathy as with notions of identification. In modern parlance, empathy is the ability to both understand and share the feelings of another, while sympathy denotes feelings of pity or sorrow for another’s misfortune. However, though the word empathy was not coined until 1909, similar ideas circulated up to two hundred years earlier under the heading of sympathy. As Jonathan Lamb explains in a recent article, sympathy in eighteenth-century discourse breaks down into “four degrees of likeness – resemblance, equality, metaphor and identity” (173). In the first degree, “sympathy is occasioned by physiological similarities close enough for us to recognize the symptoms of our own emotions in others” (171). In the second, as in the work of philosopher Francis Hutcheson, this realization of others’ similarity to us raises moral questions about their rights and “the duties we owe them” (171). The third is “a more oblique degree of resemblance that is brought home to the heart by means of imaginative or figurative expressions” (171); such ideas are traced back to Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). It is the final degree, however, that prefigures later ideas of empathy; indeed, in order to explain this fourth category, Lamb reaches for the later term: “And finally there is obliteration of all differences in a species of empathy that proclaims the identity of the subject and the object” (171). As Lamb points out, this was the meaning of sympathy for Edmund Burke, who wrote in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) that “sympathy must be considered as a sort of substitution, by which we are put into the place of another man” (70).

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, similar ideas were taken up by aesthetic theorists, but instead of substitution they considered it in terms of projection. The German term Einfühlung (“feeling-into”) was first used by Robert Vischer in his doctoral thesis of 1873, and was taken up by fellow philosopher Theodor Lipps. Lipps’ work in turn was evangelized, popularized, and reinterpreted for English readers by the essayist and novelist Vernon Lee. Though Lee introduced Einfühlung to an English- speaking audience, it was in fact the psychologist Edward Titchener who first translated 71 it, thus coining the English word “empathy”.7 Indeed, the concept’s cross-fertilization with the emerging field of psychology is confirmed by Freud’s use of Einfühlung in “Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious” (1905), in which he “views it as the process that allows us to understand others by putting ourselves in their place” (Pigman 237). This is consistent with the term’s etymology, as Lee explains in Beauty and Ugliness (1912):

This word, made up of fühlen, to feel, and ein (herein, hinein), in, into, conjugated (sich einfühlen) with the pronoun denoting the reflective mode – this word Einfühlung has existed in German aesthetics ever since Vischer and Lotze [. . .] Sich einfühlen, to transport oneself into something in feeling [. . .] has in ordinary German the meaning of putting oneself in the place of some one, of imagining, of experiencing, the feelings of some one or something. (46, emphasis in original)

Lee interprets this idea of putting oneself in the place of others in relation to aesthetic appreciation. Asserting the link between the aesthetic and the beautiful, Lee seeks to explain why it is the aesthetic and not the artistic sense by which we judge what is beautiful in art. To do this she posits a process of “aesthetic empathy”, which is the “projection of our own dynamical and emotional experience into the seen form” (29), or as Peter Gunn elaborates in his book on Lee, “the projection of our states of consciousness of our own organism into the object whose perception has aroused those states of consciousness” (158). This is “analogous to [. . .] moral sympathy” (Lee 20), as in fellow-feeling for a bereaved neighbour, in that it draws on self-knowledge. In the case of art, however, the process of aesthetic empathy involves a connection between the form of the work and our inner impulses. According to this theory, the extent to which aesthetic empathy results in pleasure or satisfaction is the extent to which the artwork may be called beautiful.

Although such aesthetic theories have been largely superseded by modernist and postmodernist thought, ideas of empathy have become highly influential in other fields. Later in the twentieth century, it became a core concept for Carl Rogers and R. D. Laing as they developed more open, patient-oriented forms of psychotherapy. It is still the subject of much psychological and neurological research, especially into its relation to altruism and “prosocial action” (behaviour that promotes social acceptance and

7 Lee cites Titchener’s Psychology of Thought Processes (MacMillan 1909), p.21. 72 friendship).8 Ideas of empathy have also been crucial to a certain strand of social philosophy. In the early twentieth century, the concept of Verstehen was developed as a sociological method of understanding which promoted the use of empathy over objective observation or causal analysis. In Understanding Social Life: The Method called Verstehen (1975), William Outhwaite explains that this concept was developed in response to the prevailing intellectual climate of positivism, and also had roots in the branch of historical inquiry that seeks to understand the actions of people in the past. Outhwaite cites the historian Johann Gustav Droysen (1838-1908), who “established the crucial connection between the theory of understanding and the philosophy of history from which the idea of a verstehende social science eventually grew” (23). Droysen argued:

The possibility of understanding rests in our familiarity with the expressions which are present as historical materials. [. . .] An expression projects itself into the person who perceives it and excites the same inner process. When we hear a cry of anguish, we experience the anguish of the person who uttered it... (qtd. in Outhwaite 21)9

Outhwaite is keen to show that reliance on this kind of experience was soon rejected in the development of the Verstehen concept. He makes a distinction between “hermeneutic” and “psychological” understanding. While the latter relies on trying somehow to experience the feelings of another, hermeneutic or interpretative understanding, for Outhwaite, is based around knowledge of the context surrounding a human action:

[. . .] when we say we understand someone’s disappointment, anger etc., or his motives for a certain action, we mean not that we know what it is to feel these emotions or the force of certain motives [. . .], but rather that we understand the ‘situation’ in which these emotions or intentions ‘make sense’. It is this sort of understanding, presupposing a certain community of outlook, which I have called hermeneutic. (15-16)

Outhwaite argues that this distinction is played out in the development of the Verstehen concept, which he attributes mainly to the German historian and philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey. Outhwaite says that Dilthey had two phases in his work. Originally, Dilthey

8 See Suzanne Keen’s survey of recent scientific literature in Empathy and the Novel pp 3-35. 9 Outhwaite gives the original source as J. G. Droysen, Grundriss der Historik (Halle-Saale, Niemeyer, 1925), para.9. 73 was interested in experiencing others’ “thoughts and emotions from the inside by “putting oneself in their shoes” (sich hineinversetzen) and reliving their experiences (nacherleben)” (27). Later in his career, however, Dilthey’s “emphasis shifts from the empathetic penetration or reconstruction of other people’s mental processes to the hermeneutic interpretation of cultural products and conceptual structures” (26), thus apparently rejecting the psychological or “empathetic” aspect of the method.

Yet current definitions of Verstehen continue to emphasize this latter component. For example, the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy describes Verstehen as follows: “understanding a human expression is a matter of knowing what in oneself would gain expression that way, and ‘reliving’ by a process of empathy the mental life of the person to be understood”. There is also a modern development of Verstehen, “simulation theory”, defined in the same dictionary as follows: “Understanding others is achieved when we can ourselves deliberate as they did, and hear their words as if they are our own”. Given this continuation of the empathic aspect in Verstehen and its derivatives, Outhwaite’s determined emphasis on interpretative and contextual elements is perhaps best seen in terms of the tendency to conflate empathy with the problematic pathological category of identification. As shown above in the work of Robert Eaglestone, the term identification can be used pejoratively to signify the delusional or morally dubious nature of claims to really feel as others feel. Outhwaite, arguing for the relevance of Verstehen to contemporary sociology, is understandably reluctant to associate it with such discourse. Nevertheless, the problem remains, and attempts to evoke empathy, whether by sociologists, novelists, or historians, are inevitable, and as such should perhaps be considered in terms of their potential value rather than proscription. I would suggest that this can only be achieved through a nuanced definition of empathy, in which its distinction from identification or sympathy is highlighted by emphasising the crucial component of understanding alongside affect.

In Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (2005), E. Ann Kaplan alludes to this problem in her criticism of the typical response to television news reports of atrocities in places like Rwanda and Iraq. She labels the viewers’ attitude “empty empathy”, or “empathy elicited by images of suffering provided without any context or background knowledge” (93). Context, knowledge, understanding, comprehension – all these terms suggest the importance of hermeneutical philosophy to 74 the problem of empathy. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s application of hermeneutics to the philosophy of historical understanding may therefore be a productive area to explore. Unlike Droysen’s rather simplistic view that when reading historical accounts one can directly experience another’s “anguish”, Gadamer offers a nuanced account of our relationship with the past, arguing that understanding can only be achieved through what he calls a “fusion of horizons”.

In Wahrheit und Methode (1960; translated in 1975 as Truth and Method), Gadamer insists that we can only understand the past in the light of the present, and only understand the present in the light of the past. “There is no more an isolated horizon of the present in itself that there are historical horizons which have to be acquired. Rather, understanding is always the fusion of these horizons supposedly existing by themselves” (306, emphasis in original). We arise from history, which shapes both the way we are now and the way we address the past. As this is inescapable, awareness of it is desirable; Gadamer calls this awareness Wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein (historically effected consciousness). We are “always already affected by history” (300). Historically effected consciousness is the awareness of the hermeneutical “situation”, from which we can never escape or step outside. Situations necessarily limit our horizons, which are finite, but can nevertheless be expanded. Historical understanding sometimes claims to “see the past in its own terms, not in terms of our contemporary criteria and prejudices but within its own historical horizon” (302-3). But this is not a “true conversation” (303); it is one-sided, as in a meeting between doctor and patient. If we deny our own perspective “we have given up the claim to find in the past any truth that is valid and intelligible for ourselves” (303). Gadamer’s “horizons”, then, are my knowledge and the knowledge presented to me in, say, a historical text. To achieve understanding I must expand my horizon beyond my limited purview, yet without leaving it behind. The space of this expansion is the universal, that which is beyond both my horizon and the horizon of the historical text and which includes them both. Within this space, the horizons are constantly shifting, expanding and contracting.

Gadamer’s account, then, moves us away from the presumption that it is only through identification that one can understand the other. Instead he talks of “transposing ourselves” within an overall framework of horizons: “Transposing ourselves consists neither in the empathy of one individual for another nor in subordinating another person 75 to our own standards; rather, it always involves rising to a higher universality that overcomes not only our own particularity but also that of the other” (305). It is this space, where self and other may be apprehended as it were from a third vantage point, that I want to invoke in order to enable a new, more expansive definition of empathy. Though Gadamer, in the quotation above, seems to take a narrow view of empathy, rejecting it in favour of “transposition”, I contend that his concept of the “fusion of horizons” may help enable an empathic space in which proximity and distance, identification and objectivity, can co-exist simultaneously without prejudice to each other.

This balance is what LaCapra seems to demand of empathy. LaCapra’s ideas on this subject have developed through his books Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1994), History and Memory after Auschwitz (1998), Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001) and History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (2004). Like Gadamer, LaCapra takes a meta-historical approach that emphasizes “one’s own implication in the problems one treats” (History and Memory 8). However, for LaCapra this is figured through a psychoanalytic framework. He urges an approach to historiography which acknowledges “the implication of the observer in the observed, what in psychoanalytic terms is treated as transference” (Writing 36). LaCapra’s use of psychoanalytic terms is rather different from that of, say, Kaja Silverman. His approach “selectively appropriates aspects of the work of Freud and of those responding to him in ways I judge to be fruitful for reconfiguring historical understanding as a process that requires a critical exchange with the past bearing on the present and future” (History and Memory 6). The key terms he lifts from Freud are “acting-out” and “working- through”, which, broadly aligned with “melancholia” and “mourning”, he sees not oppositionally but as two sides of the same coin. Working-through will often necessarily contain vestiges of acting-out; both are forms of repetition, but while the former remains fixated on the past, the latter concentrates on the present and future. Thus LaCapra focuses on ethico-political concerns such as justice, vengeance, mourning the dead, and the possible liability of perpetrators’ descendants. He even hopes that his work will enable “the elaboration of more desirable social and political institutions and practices” (Writing 85). For LaCapra, it is not enough to passively remember; ethically- focused action is needed. Memory in his writing is thus a transitive concept, and a key component of working-through. LaCapra’s work implicitly rejects any opposition 76 between memory and history, instead asserting that the work of historians, and others who write about the past, must always include aspects of memory.

Memory implies affect and subjectivity, and it is in this area that LaCapra’s notion of empathy makes its appearance. LaCapra argues that it is mistaken for historians to reject affectivity in favour of a wholly objective approach. Like Gadamer, he knows this to be self-deluding. The question is how best to activate one’s emotional response in the service of useful understanding:

Empathy [. . .] involves affectivity as a crucial aspect of understanding in the historian or other observer or analyst. As in trauma, numbing (objectification and splitting of object from subject, including self-as-subject from self-as- object) may function for the historian as a protective shield or preservative against unproblematic identification with the experience of others and the possibility of being traumatized by it. But objectivity should not be identified with objectivism or exclusive objectification that denies or forecloses empathy, just as empathy should not be conflated with unchecked identification, vicarious experience, and surrogate victimage. Objectivity requires checks and resistances to full identification, and this is one important function of meticulous research, contextualization, and the attempt to be as attentive as possible to the voices of others whose alterity is recognised. Empathy in this sense is a form of virtual, not vicarious, experience [. . .] in which emotional response comes with respect for the other and the realization that the experience of the other is not one’s own. (Writing 40)

LaCapra’s analysis of the problem of objectivity echoes Edith Wyschogrod’s notion of the “heterological historian” in her book An Ethics of Remembering (1998): “The heterological historian is driven, on the one hand, by an impassioned necrophilia which would bring to life the dead others for whom she speaks. On the other hand, as “objective”, she consciously or otherwise assume responsibility for a dispassionate relation to events” (3).

But LaCapra goes further by defining this problem in terms of empathy. He separates empathy from similar concepts, carefully distancing himself from the problems of identification:

Empathy, as I have construed the term, is to be disengaged from its traditional insertion in a binary logic of identity and difference. In terms of this questionable logic, empathy is mistakenly conflated with identification or fusion with the other; it is opposed to sympathy implying difference from the discrete 77

other who is the object of pity, charity, or condescension. In contradistinction to this entire frame of reference, empathy should rather be understood in terms of an affective relation, rapport, or bond with the other recognized and respected as other. (Writing 212-3)

Empathy is to be activated through a process of “empathic unsettlement”, which is “a kind of virtual experience through which one puts oneself in the other’s position while recognizing the difference of that position and hence not taking the other’s place” (Writing 78). Its goal is “better self-understanding and [. . .] a sensitivity or openness to responses that generate[s] necessary tensions in one’s account” (Writing 105).

These definitions show that LaCaprian empathy is essentially self-reflexive. In his later book History in Transit, LaCapra moves on from describing the desired position of the writer to closer attention to the text or artifact, in which again the most valued quality is self-reflexivity. He develops the concept of “situational transcendence”, an approach to events like the Holocaust that is inherently self-questioning and not caught up with the “symptomatic”. LaCapra argues that symptomatic artifacts, such as racist tracts, contain nothing that invites critique or debate.

By contrast, more critical and self-critical artifacts or phenomena signal or even foreground (however subtly) their own symptomatic dimensions and engage processes that offer perspective on these dimensions and may provide the wherewithal for their critique, at times indicating transformative possibilities. The latter possibilities could be termed situationally transcendent in that they work (or play) with and through problems (including those transmitted from the past) and do not leap beyond them in some unmediated rupture. (History in Transit 10)

Though mostly concerned with historiography and critical theory, LaCapra acknowledges that literature too may contain these elements of empathic self-reflexivity and thereby contribute to our understanding of the past. Though, like Eaglestone, he rejects fiction about Holocaust perpetrators on the grounds that it may lead to “a confused sense of identification with or involvement in certain figures and their beliefs or actions in a manner that may well subvert judgment” (Writing 203), he also argues that the relative freedom of art and literature to experiment may be productive: “The problem that clearly deserves further reflection is the nature of actual and desirable responses in different genres, practices, and disciplines, including the status of mixed or hybridized genres and the possibility of playing different roles or exploring different 78 approaches in a given text” (Writing 110). I argue that the works of writers like Sebald and Foer constitute precisely “mixed or hybridized genres” in that they combine fiction, (auto-)biography and history, and, moreover, that they include the element of self- reflexivity which as we have seen is crucial to a productive notion of empathy. In particular, the texts I analyse in later chapters foreground their engagement with the problems of how to approach the past by inserting a version of themselves into their narratives in the form of a persona (“playing different roles”). These personae are in a sense a manifestation in fiction of Gadamer’s “historically effected consciousness” in that they foreground the importance of the observer in the observed, the perspective of the present on the past. As later chapters will show, the insertion of ambiguous personae between author and subject helps enable an approach to the past in which proximity (subjectivity, identification) and distance (objectivity, critical understanding) occur simultaneously in a complex gesture of empathy.

Because this gesture is achieved through narrative forms, the term “narrative empathy” suggests itself. However, this is both insufficient and potentially misleading. Indeed, the phrase has been used recently to describe a quite different phenomenon: the link between empathy and altruism in relation to reading. In Empathy and the Novel (2007), Suzanne Keen asks whether the act of reading fiction boosts our empathic response and leads to prosocial, altruistic actions in the real world. Though Keen is sceptical about such claims, they generate an interesting enquiry into what happens when we read, and the relationships between reader, author and text. For Keen, the theory of affect, as in, for example, readers’ identification with characters, is a neglected area of enquiry (though she cites a growing body of work in the area of “cognitive literary studies”). Keen is interested in the unsophisticated responses of “ordinary readers”, whose perspective she regards as too often ignored. This may underlie her conception of empathy as an almost involuntary phenomenon: “Throughout this book I distinguish the spontaneous, responsive sharing of an appropriate feeling as empathy, and the more complex, differentiated feeling for another as sympathy (sometimes called empathic concern in psychological literature” (4). This is very different from the idea of empathy developed in the hermeneutical and historical tradition, which I am adopting, in which empathy is distinguished from identification precisely through its complex mingling of cognitive understanding with shared feeling. In this frame of reference, the “spontaneous, responsive sharing of an appropriate feeling” would be more likely to be 79 considered simply as identification, while sympathy would be regarded as more straightforward than empathy.

The difference in approach to the topic of empathy in literature between Keen’s thesis and the present study is also highlighted by her interpretation of psychology and neurology. Drawing on scientific research, Keen notes that empathy is commonly considered a culturally prized trait. She cites the work of Martin Hoffman, who argues that through education, empathy can become prosocial and altruistic. However, others contend that empathy can just as easily lead to bad outcomes, immoral actions, or even the impediment of justice by obscuring the common good. Keen also cites research suggesting that factors other than reading are more important for enabling prosocial actions or for the creation of an altruistic personality, including education, religion, politics, upbringing, environment, and especially the social attitude of egalitarianism. This would seem to marginalize her project of investigating the impact of empathic novel-reading. Nevertheless, Keen proposes to analyse what she calls “[t]he position of the reader with respect to the author’s strategic empathizing in fictional world-making” (xiv). She identifies three levels of narrative empathy, “bounded”, “ambassadorial” and “broadcast”, which correspond to feelings for the “in-group”, “chosen others” and “every reader” respectively (xiv).

This theory of narrative empathy differs from my thesis in many respects, of which two are particularly important. First, it concentrates more on the role of the reader than of the writer. Second, it leaves out the dimensions of time and memory. Novels like Sebald’s Austerlitz and Foer’s Everything is Illuminated are overtly concerned with the nature and consequences of memory, and the relationship between the author in the present and the subject in the past. They reflect a wider concern in contemporary society with memory and memorialisation, an obvious example being the proliferation of Holocaust monuments and memorials. They also reflect critical discourses such as trauma theory, with its emphasis on the belated effects of the past in the present, and memory studies, with its interest in explaining how people “remember” events of previous generations.

It is in these areas that the term “transgenerational” has begun to make an appearance. For example, in a list of key questions raised by the work of Sebald, Long and 80

Whitehead ask: “Is the transgenerational transmission of trauma an appropriate model for describing the impact of the war on those who came after?” (9) Such ideas of memory “transmission” can be traced back to the concept of “transgenerational haunting” proposed in the 1970s by psychologists Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok to describe the way unspeakable family dramas may be passed down through generations. Abraham and Torok’s The Wolf Man’s Magic Word (1976) has been extensively explicated by Esther Rashkin in Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative (1992). Rashkin begins by explaining Abraham and Torok’s theory of “transgenerational haunting” by “phantoms”. A phantom is a psychic phenomenon that arises when an unspeakable family drama (what Rashkin calls a secret) is silently transmitted from one generation to the next. This is explained by way of a “dual unity” theory of child development, in which children receive their family history during the weaning process. If at this crucial period there is a “gap or lacuna in the parent’s speech”, then this “unspeakable secret suspended within the adult is transmitted silently to the child in ‘undigested’ form and lodges within his or her mental topography as an unmarked tomb of inaccessible knowledge” (Rashkin 27-8). Thus transgenerational haunting is offered as an explanation for traumatic symptoms in later life.

Other uses of “transgenerational” include Andreas Huyssen’s description of Sebald as embodying “transgenerational traumatization absent the experience itself” (149), and a recent book by psychiatrists on the effects of the Holocaust on the descendants of survivors, The Third Reich in the Unconscious: Transgenerational Transmission and its Consequences (Volkan et al., 2002). The term “transgenerational”, absent from all dictionaries, seems then to denote a mysterious process by which events (especially traumatic ones) from the recent past come to effect later generations. Thus it partakes of “memory” in its more expansive sense of that which we actively choose to remember that is nevertheless not part of our personal memory-store. As such it is related to Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory”, which is “distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection” and which “characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth” (22). I deal with this idea in detail in Chapter 5 of the present study. For now, it is these dimensions of time and memory that I wish to add to the concept of empathy in order to begin to describe the approach to the Holocaust taken by certain recent authors. The Latin prefix trans- is defined in the OED as “across, to or on 81 the further side of, beyond, over”, and as later chapters will show there is a strong sense in Sebald and Foer’s work of a desire to move beyond immediate experience and journey to the further side of the past, whether through travel to historical sites, genealogical reconstruction, or (imagined) contact with survivors from that past.

This chapter has attempted to show that the ethical and epistemological problems of identification may be resolved to an extent by drawing on a nuanced definition of empathy, which emphasizes the latter term’s simultaneous combination of affect and objectivity, and its dual meaning of sharing the feelings of others while at the same time understanding or comprehending the situation and context. Rather than a species of identification, as suggested in approaches ranging from Scheler’s taxonomy of feeling to Keen’s theory of the novel, empathy in LaCaprian terms is a distinct concept. Versions of empathy have been useful in the development of aesthetic theory, sociology, and psychology, but it is its links with historical and hermeneutic understanding which have proved more relevant to my study of authors who write about the past. Meanwhile, by adding “transgenerational” to empathy I wish to emphasize the importance of ideas of time, memory and generational distance. Through transgenerational empathy the horrors of the Holocaust may be approached in a way that neither over-identifies with nor objectifies its victims, but instead, to use Gadamer’s terms, enacts a self-reflexive “historically effected consciousness” that may enable a productive “fusion of horizons” between the writer and the traumatic past. Though Gadamer did not consider this empathic as such, I contend that this wider space of hermeneutical understanding is an ideal vicinity in which to contain LaCaprian empathy, which posits the possibility that the other may be approached with affect while nevertheless maintaining one’s distance. Later chapters on Sebald and Foer will seek to clarify how this “transgenerational empathy” manifests itself in narrative. First, however, I turn to two contemporary Holocaust narratives which fail to achieve empathy and remain fixed in an attitude of identification through their favouring of memory over history. 82

Chapter 3

The consequences of promoting memory over history: identification and deception in Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces and Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments

“History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral: what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers” (Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces 138).

“The document I hold in my hands [. . .] gives the date of my birth as February 12, 1941. But this date has nothing to do with either the history of this century or my personal history” (Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments 154).

Two apparently very different contributions to Holocaust literature appeared in 1996: a densely poetic novel about the legacy of the Shoah, Fugitive Pieces; and the English translation of a sensational memoir by a child survivor, Fragments: Memories of a Childhood, 1939-1948. The former is the first work of fiction by Anne Michaels, a Canadian previously known as a poet. The authorship of the latter, originally published in German as Bruchstücke: Aus einer Kindheit 1939-1948 (1995), is famously less straightforward. The name on the title page, Binjamin Wilkomirski, was later conclusively proved to be the pseudonym of Bruno Dössekker. Dössekker had not lived through two Nazi concentration camps as he claimed, and a literary fraud was exposed (see Ganzfried 1998, Lappin 1999, Gourevitch 1999, and Maechler 2001). Though very different in form and provenance, then, Fugitive Pieces and Fragments nevertheless share, on both textual and meta-textual levels, one over-arching theme: memory. In this chapter, I argue that the attitude of both authors towards the Holocaust is defined by their favouring of “memory” over “history”. Though they carried out extensive historical research, both profess a disdain for history as such in favour of what they perceive to be the healing and redemptive power of memory. Reflecting wider trends, both Michaels and Wilkomirski place memory above history, belief above evidence, affect above cognition, feeling above knowledge. Memory is so important in their value-systems that it becomes acceptable to them to appropriate the memories or subject-position of others, so long as beneficial effects appear to accrue, whether to the individual (Wilkomirski) or to society as a whole (Michaels). 83

This process may be characterized as a species of identification. Wilkomirski identified with Holocaust survivors to the extent that he came to believe he was one himself. Michaels’ narrators appear to equate the status of those born after with eye-witnesses to the event – a highly dubious identification. Fugitive Pieces also portrays the redemptive path of its characters’ lives as being directly correlated with the extent to which they identify with victims. Thus I will endeavour to show that the position of these authors in relation to the past is essentially identificatory rather than empathic. Not only is their emphasis on memory a problematic mode of identification, but they may also be seen to over-identify with memory itself. By privileging memory and affect they take a position of over-proximity, deliberately precluding the distance that other authors, for ethical and epistemological reasons, build into their narrative structures. Michaels and Wilkomirski polemically oppose memory to history, in which the one stands for identification, affect, and proximity, while the other is thought to equal objectivity, rationality, and distance. As suggested in the last chapter, it is rather in the combination of these attributes that LaCaprian empathy may be achieved. It may thus follow that oppositions between memory and history are false or unhelpful, and that textual practice should seek a balance between the two. Indeed, it is precisely this balance that forms the core of certain works by W. G. Sebald and Jonathan Safran Foer which are analysed in later chapters of the present study.

It may be helpful first to put the memory-history opposition into context. An initial observation is that the argument, at least within the academic world, appears to take place within the field or discipline of “History”. The conflict is not between memory and history as such, but between a historiographical practice that welcomes and embraces memory and one that treats it with suspicion. In 1992, the Harvard historian Charles Maier, at a conference entitled “The Future of Memory”, treated this issue as one of some importance. Is there, Maier asks, “A Surfeit of Memory?” Despite careful equivocation, his answer is ultimately damning. For Maier, the “memory industry” is characterized by “complacency” and “collective self-indulgence”. The contemporary emphasis on memory is “inauthentic and unhealthy,” “neurasthenic and disabling,” a “semi-opaque and self-referential activity” which signifies a “retreat from transformative politics”. History, on the other hand, offers a wider perspective, ensures proper “causal sequencing,” and takes seriously the responsibility to “explain” the past 84

(137, 141, 143, 150). Maier’s speech was delivered at the tenth anniversary conference of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. Though careful to praise this venture in his opening remarks, Maier’s argument nevertheless reveals the fear and suspicion felt by historians in the face of the emergence of such projects which place memory at their centre.

Maier’s speech took place in the same year as the appearance of the seventh and final volume of Pierre Nora’s vast project of French cultural memory, Les Lieux de Mémoire (1984-92). This venture dissected the cultural consciousness of France through its monuments, rituals, legends and artifacts. As general editor, Nora used the project to express a startling thesis, in which he laments the loss of an organic mode of memory to the forces of modern historical consciousness. For Nora, this amounts to nothing less than a “conquest and eradication of memory by history” (8).10 Whereas memory used to be social and “immediate,” it has now become individual and “indirect”. “True memory” consists of “gestures and habits, in skills passed down by unspoken traditions, in the body’s inherent self-knowledge, in unstudied reflexes and ingrained memories,” whereas “memory transformed by its passage through history” is “voluntary and deliberate, experienced as a duty, no longer spontaneous” (13). (There are echoes here of Walter Benjamin’s thesis that the death of storytelling is “a concomitant symptom of the secular productive forces of history” [86].) As a result, for Nora, memory’s manifestations in the world have also changed. “There are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory” (7).

Nora’s argument expresses an almost mystical nostalgia. Lawrence Kritzman, in his foreword to the English translation, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, observes that “Nora’s magnum opus represents the symptomology of a certain form of cultural melancholia” (ix). That this nostalgic melancholia is expressed in terms of an opposition between memory and history, which is nevertheless enacted within a historiographical project, reveals the importance that memory as a concept had gained by this time. The influence of Halbwachs’ theory of collective memory is clearly visible and often noted. Just as important to the rise of memory, however,

10 Page numbers are from Nora’s 1989 article in Representations, which is substantively the same as his general introduction to Les Lieux de Mémoire. 85 particularly in relation to Holocaust studies, is the Jewish memorial tradition. This strand reveals the sacred aspect to certain views of collective memory that is implicit in Nora’s work. Yosef Yerushalmi’s Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982) makes this feature explicit while expressing strikingly similar sentiments to the French historian. Yerushalmi draws on a specifically Jewish notion of memory as active, ritualistic, redemptive, and hopeful, and invokes the traditions of rabbinical ahistoricism, Kabbalah, and Gnostic myth. Despite the survival of these traditions in Jewish consciousness, he argues, collective Jewish memory has been “eroded” (127). This is a “malady” that cannot be “healed” by historians (94). Like Nora, Yerushalmi distinguishes memory from modern historiography, arguing that the former is selective and the latter all-encompassing. This totalizing tendency of history is criticized for challenging and reversing the process of collective memory. Modern historical consciousness is no substitute for the certainties of the past: “Nothing has replaced the coherence and meaning with which a powerful messianic faith once imbued both Jewish past and future. Perhaps nothing else can” (95).

Accusations of history’s totalising propensities go hand in hand with the rise of memory, and can be traced back much further than Yerushalmi. In “The Burden of History” (1966), Hayden White argued that historians must draw on innovations in both the artistic and scientific spheres in order to “recognize that there is no such thing as a single correct view of any object under study but that there are many correct views”. Working within this new, pluralist approach, historians “should no longer naively expect that statements about a given epoch or complex of events in the past ‘correspond’ to some pre-existent body of ‘raw facts’” (47). Such arguments have paved the way for the voices of apparently insignificant individuals to be included in accounts of the past. Their memories are no longer discounted because of their lack of correspondence to “established” facts, but instead are embraced, either for generating new ideas and perspectives, or for expressing the formerly silenced voices of the oppressed.

This vein of thought has been nourished by Michel Foucault’s project of re-examining history from the perspective of its participants and revealing the power structures ignored by previous assumptions. In 1990, George Lipsitz adapted Foucault’s term counter-memory to promote the pluralistic and subjective qualities of memory over 86 totalising historical accounts. Counter-memory for Lipsitz is an ethical act of criticism. It is

a way of remembering and forgetting that starts with the local, the immediate, and the personal. Unlike historical narratives that begin with the totality of human existence and then locate specific actions and events within that totality, counter-memory starts with the particular and the specific and then builds outward toward a total story. (213)

In itself this method appears unobjectionable. But Lipsitz uses it to make a claim about different kinds of “truth”. He examines five “popular” novels about marginalized peoples, which are held to exemplify the heterogeneous plurality of experience and thereby challenge the oppressions of history. However, they also tap into the collective memory of their readership, which is conceived to be from the same ethnic or social group as the writer. This collective memory, for Lipsitz, is the only relevant test:

If counter-memory lacks the traditional truth tests of evidence basic to linear histories, it also subjects itself to an even more rigorous test – the standard of collective memory and desire. For these narratives to succeed, they must resonate with the experiences and feelings of their audiences. (228)

This impulse to replace “truth tests of evidence” with “the standard of collective memory and desire” is precisely what Charles Maier feared about the prevailing intellectual climate. Meanwhile, the quasi-mystical, perhaps even sacral, tendencies of Lipsitz’s argument are revealed by his appeal (and here he self-avowedly departs from Foucault) to a new (or perhaps old) kind of totality:

It is in looking at the great cycle that binds us all that counter-memory surpasses history and myth, that it transcends the false closures of linear history and the destructive ruptures and divisions of myth to create an active memory which draws upon the pluralities of the past and present to illumine the opportunities of the future. (226, emphasis mine)

Thus once again the appeal to memory includes nostalgia for an organic or “natural” apprehension of the world that has been somehow obscured by contemporary life and thought. Nora’s “unspoken traditions,” Yerushalmi’s “coherence and meaning” through faith, and Lipsitz’s “great cycle” are all strangely vague formulations that announce their authors’ wish to stand outside empirical evidence or objective rationality. 87

In a wide-ranging article on the rise of memory studies published in 2000, Kerwin Lee Klein criticizes this tendency. Klein points out that supposedly postmodern ideas about memory, as found in our “new memorial consciousness” (129), are essentially the same as those of the pre-modern era, but differently clothed. For Klein, this is revealed by the religious and spiritual connotations found in the language of memory studies: testimony, redemption, ritual, witnessing, mourning and so on. Thus, “the new memory work displaces the old hermeneutics of suspicion with a therapeutic discourse whose quasi- religious gestures link it with memory’s deep semantic past” (141-2). This atavistic impulse appears almost everywhere in recent writing about memory. Andreas Huyssen’s Twilight Memories (1995) is a case in point. The cultural historian makes an important point about the generative power of memory, arguing that its basic structural “fissure” between experience and representation underlies “cultural and artistic creativity” (2-3). Further, he very reasonably argues that “the shift from history to memory represents a welcome critique of compromised teleological notions of history rather than being simply anti-historical, relativistic, or subjective” (6). But in locating the memory boom as a reaction against late capitalism and the information revolution, Huyssen implies that there was once a golden age when time was experienced more naturally. For Huyssen, attention to memory

represents the attempt to slow down information processing, to resist the dissolution of time in the synchronicity of the archive, to recover a mode of contemplation outside the universe of simulation and fast-speed information and cable networks, to claim some anchoring space in a world of puzzling and often threatening heterogeneity, non-synchronicity, and information overload. (7)

Huyssen thus links the rise of memory with a concurrent rejection of modern life. In this argument, memory is the shield with which we are to defend ourselves against the inhuman advances of (post)modernity. This suggests that memory is somehow what makes us human; and it is only a short leap from this to say that memory is identity.

Indeed, work in cultural memory tends to proceed from this assumption. For example, Marita Sturken begins her book on American cultural memory of AIDS and Vietnam, Tangled Memories (1997), with this bald assertion: “As the means by which we remember who we are, memory provides the very core of identity” (1). But memory is 88 fallible and vulnerable. Each time we remember something, we re-member it; that is, we inevitably modify the memory by the act of remembrance. Memories do not live in a filing cabinet of the mind, waiting to be retrieved in their original state. As Linda Grant writes, paraphrasing neurobiologist Steven Rose, memory “isn’t a place, a store- house or a machine for recording events” but “an intricate and ever shifting net of firing neurons [. . .] the twistings and turnings of which rearrange themselves completely each time something is recalled” (qtd. in King, Memory 15). As I argued in Chapter 1 of the present study, this also goes for so-called traumatic memories. So to the extent that we “are” our memories, humans are uncertain, changeable, and paradoxical. We would get nothing done if we only relied on what our memories tell us. Instead we combine the faculty with attempts at objective, rational, empirical testing, one manifestation of which is the impulse to write history. This combination may be compared to the dual structure of empathy, defined in this study as a simultaneous gesture of proximity and distance. Indeed, LaCapra’s idea of “empathic unsettlement” stems precisely from his historian’s desire for objective truth combined with unease about the affective power of memory, which he nevertheless seeks to acknowledge and harness.

LaCapra’s thesis, then, arises from the crucial importance placed on the opposition between memory and history. As in the views of Charles Maier quoted above, this arises in turn from a suspicion of new methods which bypass empirical truth-testing. As Roth and Salas summarize in their introduction to Disturbing Remains: Memory, History and Crisis in the Twentieth Century (2001): “Appeals to memory are not subject to the same criteria of adjudication as appeals to historical evidence. They claim an unmediated authenticity not subject to academic critique” (3). In the field of Holocaust studies, this has led to a sometimes polarized argument about the relative merits of documentary and testimonial evidence. Raul Hilberg, for example, compiled his landmark work The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) almost entirely from statistics and documents, largely ignoring survivor accounts. One problem with this approach is that it necessarily draws on the accounts of perpetrators, as it is they who wrote the memoranda, timetables and reports on which Hilberg draws, rather than those of victims, whose voices may consequently go unheard. In his memoir The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (1996), Hilberg defends his position by citing three problems with survivor accounts. First, survivors are in no way representative of victims as a whole; they cannot be described as a “random sample” 89

(133) when the majority of the cohort are dead. Second, interest in survivor accounts has tended to exalt victims and portray them as heroic whatever their actual actions. Most importantly, however, survivor accounts omit details the historian needs:

In their accounts, survivors generally leave out the setting of their experiences, such as specific localities or the names and positions of persons they encountered. Even when they talk about themselves, they do not necessarily reveal mundane information [. . .]. Understandably the survivors seldom speak of those experiences that were most humiliating or embarrassing [. . .]. Only one fact is always revealed clearly and completely. It is the self-portrait of the survivors, their psychological makeup, and what it took to survive. (133)

This account of the survivor memory indicates its tendency towards selectivity and subjectivity. Hilberg prefers to focus on documents, for which he displays all the reverence of a life-long archival researcher. However, despite Hilberg’s influence in the field, the extent to which his approach has led to a lack of attention to survivor memory is negligible. In the last few decades there has been a plethora of first-person testimonial accounts published as books; new museal approaches that privilege individual voices, such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.; television, film and novel treatments that focus on (often heroic) individuals; and vast video projects like the Fortunoff Archive and Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation which seek to record the memories of as many Holocaust survivors as possible. Hilberg was perhaps fighting a losing battle in his plea for attention to facts and documentary evidence in the face of the memory boom.

It was in this climate that Binjamin Wilkomirski’s memoir appeared, first in Germany in 1995, and then in translation the following year as Fragments. In many ways this text exemplifies the turn from objective history to affective memory in the latter stages of the twentieth century, as the following analysis will show. Now that the events of the “Wilkomirski Affair” are several years past, it is perhaps possible to gain some perspective on them; to evaluate the critical response, which appears to have peaked; and to move away from the critical fixation on what the case “reveals” and return to the original text as an object of analysis.

The facts were exhaustively researched and presented by Stefan Maechler in his report The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth (2001), and I rely on this work in 90 what follows.11 The story put forward by the author of Fragments is that he was born Binjamin Wilkomirski in the late 1930s in Eastern Europe; escaped from Riga when the Nazis arrived, possibly witnessing the death of his father; endured a series of horrors in the camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz; lived after the war in a Krakow orphanage before being smuggled to Switzerland and another children’s home; and finally was adopted by an affluent Zurich couple named Dössekker and given a new identity. However, Maechler has proved beyond reasonable doubt that the author of Fragments was in fact born Bruno Grosjean in Switzerland in 1941 to an unmarried mother of low social status; was given up for adoption after two years; had three sets of foster-parents before eventually settling with the Dössekkers, whose name he took; and from a young age demonstrated both a tendency towards self-invention and an obsession with the Holocaust. Indeed, Maechler persuasively argues that Bruno Dössekker’s creation of the identity of a Jewish Holocaust survivor named “Binjamin Wilkomirski” took place gradually over many years before culminating with the publication of his book in 1995, and that the case is as much one of pathological identity confusion as deliberate fraud.

In both versions of events, the boy grows up to be Bruno Dössekker, a successful musician and instrument builder in Switzerland. The contradictions between the “memories” set out in Fragments and the author’s public identity were highlighted in a letter from a local journalist to the publisher, Suhrkamp, while the manuscript was still being processed. As a result, Dössekker was prevailed upon by Suhrkamp to add an Afterword which acknowledges the discrepancy, and in which he advances the claim that his birth certificate is both incomplete and false. Indeed, the author of Fragments states that he has “taken legal steps to have this imposed identity annulled” (154), though in fact there was nothing wrong with the certificate and Dössekker’s “legal steps” were never taken. On publication the book received critical acclaim, though commercial sales were relatively small. Translated into nine languages, its author received the National Jewish Book Award (1996), the Prix Mémoire de la Shoah by the Fondation du Judaïsme Français, and Jewish Quarterly’s prize for non-fiction (both 1997). Blake Eskin, in The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski (2002), reports that while many Holocaust experts praised the book, there were dissenting voices from such notables as Raul Hilberg and Lawrence Langer, who unfortunately did

11 Maechler’s report was “[o]riginally published in somewhat different form in Switzerland in the German language as Der Fall Wilkomirski”, in 2000, according to the copyright page in my edition. 91 not put them into print. Instead, the first published doubts about the veracity of Fragments appeared in a review on the Amazon website in March 1998 by Michael Mills, an amateur historian known for his revisionist sympathies (Eskin 76). However, it was the Swiss journalist Daniel Ganzfried who officially broke the story, aggressively challenging the author of Fragments in a series of articles for the Zurich weekly Die Weltwoche, the first of which appeared in August 1998. Ganzfried had previously published his own Holocaust book, Der Absender (1995), a novel in which he openly fictionalized the story of his survivor father; perhaps this made him alert to the issues of truth and memory suggested by Fragments. Then in 1999, two investigative journalists interviewed Dössekker and presented further evidence of the deception. The titles of Elena Lappin and Philip Gourevitch’s articles – “A Man with Two Heads” and “The Memory Thief” – neatly summarize the twin approaches of amateur psychoanalysis and moral accusation that the case provoked. These interventions forced Dössekker’s literary agent into action. It engaged Maechler, a Swiss historian, whose findings persuaded publishers worldwide to belatedly withdraw the book from their lists. This has resulted in the curious situation that the text of Fragments is now only available as an appendix to Maechler’s report or through second-hand sources.

The 1997 Picador edition of Fragments carries, on its back cover, some quotations from the reviews. The first, attributed to Paul Bailey in the Daily Telegraph, concludes: “The bravery of [Wilkomirski’s] undertaking cannot be exaggerated, nor the sense of human dignity it leaves with the reader.” The second, quoting Patricia Lee in the Literary Review, calls Fragments “[a]n unforgettable tribute on many levels [. . .] [which] implicitly [. . .] honours the personal qualities of the writer”. By virtue of such “bravery” and other “human qualities”, Wilkomirski was initially compared to Paul Celan, Elie Wiesel, and even Primo Levi (Maechler 114), thus conferring authority by proxy. This authority includes the sense that he was able to personally verify historical occurrences; according to Taja Gut in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Wilkomirski is “one of the most essential witnesses to the death camps” (qtd. in Maechler 113-4). The dark irony with which these constructions of a brave, authoritative witness must now be seen should not obscure their contingent factors. It would be unfair to criticize these initial reviewers of Fragments for their unquestioning praise, as many factors would have blinded them to the deception. Along with the sheer affective power of the story Wilkomirski tells, there may, for example, have been a desire to be on the right side of 92 the growing debate about Holocaust denial. Deborah Lipstadt’s book Denying the Holocaust had appeared in 1993; the accused historian David Irving sued her in 1996, the year Fragments appeared in English.

However, one aspect of the response that deserves closer attention is the way critics ignored or even denied the literary qualities of the book, seeing Fragments as a direct window onto the experience of the Holocaust – as a piece of pure content without form. A review by Jonathan Kozol described Fragments as “free of literary artifice” (qtd. in Hasian, 235). Arthur Samuels of Schocken Books, Wilkomirski’s New York publisher, defended the text as follows: “I like it for its simplicity, humanity, lack of artifice” (qtd. in Lappin, 49). Whatever the reasons for this response, it is clear that in reality the opposite is the case. Fragments consists of a highly structured series of associative flashbacks. It has a complex mix of narrative voices: the child Binjamin at various ages, and the adult author who “remembers” both the original memories and the supposed events to which they relate. It gains its power through a carefully crafted use of pace, in which horrific revelations are gradually accreted alongside narratorial interventions that highlight their traumatic after-effects. In contrast, the horrors themselves, which include rats living in corpses and starving babies eating their own fingers, now appear excessive, grotesque, and far-fetched. Therefore, perhaps it is not the experiences that constitute the book’s power to persuade, but the way they are represented: in short, the “artifice” of Fragments as a literary text. As J. J. Long points out, readers who have the benefit of hindsight must now begin to evaluate these textual elements: “The only way in which Wilkomirski-Grosjean’s text can be ‘rescued’ for literary history is to refuse the proffered identification with the narrator and turn attention to those formal techniques that proved so effective in creating the illusion of authenticity” (62-3). The following analysis constitutes a contribution to this project of retrieval.

Fragments opens with a series of claims about the nature of its narrator’s memory:

My early childhood memories are planted, first and foremost, in exact snapshots of my photographic memory and in the feelings imprinted in them, and the physical sensations. Then comes memory of being able to hear, and things I heard, then things I thought, and last of all, memory of things I said. (4) 93

This impressively comprehensive list, featuring sight, touch, hearing, affect, and both internal and external speech, may help persuade the reader that what follows is a true account. The narrator reinforces his adjective “exact” with the metaphor of photographic development, and a few lines later backs this up with a further image: “My earliest memories are a rubble field of isolated images and events. Shards of memory with hard knife-sharp edges, which still cut flesh if touched today” (4). In addition to appealing to the reader’s sympathy through shared knowledge of shards’ ability to wound, the sharpness of these fragments of memory suggests clarity. Throughout the rest of the book the narrator intervenes with similar claims, supported by metaphors like branding and scoring: “The image of the two boys in front of the barracks door is burned into my mind” (60); “the last day in the room is embedded in sharp contours in my mind, indelibly” (101). Yet these claims to certainty and clarity are constantly undermined. Recollection is often “hazy” (113) or “all a blur” (115). Time and place are vague: “I don’t remember any longer where it was, or when” (77).

Of course, these conflicting claims are consistent with the common experience of memories from childhood, with their combination of powerful images and faded certainties, and as such may even bolster the reader’s confidence and trust. But there is a more subtle contradiction to the narrator’s memory claims, revealed by his labelling of certain recollections as uninvited and unwelcome. A happy memory of sledding in Riga is “quickly scared off by other ones, dark and suffocating, which push into my brain and won’t let go” (5). Later, awakening from a nightmare in the safety of post-war Switzerland, the narrator reports that he “had to think about” the time he was locked in a dog kennel (40, emphasis mine). Again, in the Polish orphanage, a guilt-triggering encounter with two new boys heralds the intrusion of unwanted memory, which now has even greater physical force:

I couldn’t stop the vivid memories of the new boy in the big barracks. They [the memories] forced me to lie still and for the thousandth time I had to be a spectator at what had happened to the new boy in front of the barracks, and how it was my fault and my crime. (58)

These experiences are of course consistent with the phenomenon of unwanted “flashbacks” experienced by sufferers from post-traumatic stress disorder, but as I argued in my first chapter these should be treated with caution. Indeed, the notion of 94

Holocaust memories returning of their own accord, as a kind of literal return of the past, has become a cliché ripe for satire. For example, in Jonathan Raban’s novel Surveillance (2006), a character named “Augie Vanags” writes an account of his Jewish childhood in Europe, “Boy 381”, that includes the usual mix of hiding and horrors. Vanags professes to have written this book in just four weeks, having not thought or spoken of that time for over sixty years. It just seems to write itself; as he comments to a journalist: “A lot of it was news to me” (142).

Leaving aside the question of whether such returning memories can be trusted, Wilkomirski’s account of his intrusive, unbidden thoughts is also, I would argue, a denial of agency and evasion of responsibility. If the memories appear unbidden, the narrator seems to suggest, it is not his fault if they turn out to be inaccurate or even untrue. In the light of the book’s exposure as invented, this element may be read as an unconscious admission of deception. Indeed, I would like to suggest that Fragments is as deceptive on the level of the text as it is in the wider sense of a fraudulent claim to remember the Holocaust.

A key aspect of this deception is the book’s false claim to give a child’s-eye perspective. At the outset, the author of Fragments declares clear intentions regarding narrative voice and point of view: “If I’m going to write about it, I have to give up on the ordering logic of grown-ups; it would only distort what happened” (4). He will, he says, relate only his unadorned memories, “with no benefit of perspective or vanishing point” (5). Leaving aside the question of whether it is only “grown-ups” who benefit from the faculty of logic, this claim to a child’s-eye perspective carries interesting literary implications. Eskin argues that by giving up the adult point of view, the author of Fragments enlists the reader as a kind of accomplice. The reader supplies details that the author, to maintain a consistent child perspective, must miss out, according to Eskin:

Making sense of Fragments requires a certain level of involvement, and if you suspend your tendency to apply logic, you must use your imagination. The impressionistic descriptions often use a part to represent the whole: when the child’s eye notices a menacing boot or a gray uniform, the reader must rely on his prior knowledge of the Holocaust to fill in the rest of the malevolent Nazi wearing it. The episodic, nonlinear narrative works the same way, requiring us to connect the dots to create his biography. (30) 95

While it is true that the text would be incomprehensible without some knowledge of the Holocaust, and that we do indeed “connect the dots” while reading it, these factors are no more pronounced than in any number of novels. This suggests that though Eskin wants to complain about being hoodwinked and enlisted as an accessory to deception, what he really objects to is fictional technique being used in an ostensibly factual account.

Leaving aside for now this problem of genre, close attention to the text reveals that the author of Fragments’ avowed intention to give an exclusively child’s-eye perspective is in any case not achieved. If, after the opening statements, the adult voice never re- appeared, except perhaps in the Afterword, we could perhaps suspend disbelief, participate in the illusion, and agree that the author gives us his unadorned memories. But Fragments offers no such consistency; the adult author constantly intervenes. For example, at the beginning of the narrator’s journey across Europe, he boards a train destined for “Lemberg” (L’vov). Here the re-entry of the adult voice is announced not only with the introduction of hindsight but with a concurrent change of tense:

[child:] I don’t know what Lemberg is. It’s some kind of magic word, that stays hanging and swaying in my head. It seems to be a place, maybe a town [. . .] [adult:] We never reached Lemberg, and we never found the mysterious person who was supposed to help us. Instead, this was the beginning of years that I only slowly came to understand, when someone tried to talk hope into me again, and took me on another long journey. (10, my additions)

If this is not the “benefit of perspective” then it is difficult to imagine what would be. Again and again the adult voice returns. At the beginning of Chapter 9, the narrator states that he owes his life to his friend Jankl; “I should write a whole book in his honour, not just one pitiful little chapter” (72), he declares. The account of his friendship with “Mila” moves from memories of their time together in Krakow to later moments in the narrator’s adulthood: “Years later, when we were both grown up [. . .]” (82). The child’s trauma resulting from seeing a rat emerge out of the belly of a corpse is bolstered by an account of this event’s after-effects in adult life: “Many years later I went with my wife for the birth of our first son. [. . .]. I wasn’t ready for this little half- head of hair. All I could do was stand still and stare at it, and once again, like an echo from before, I heard the ringing and crackling noise in my chest” (87). After walking past the broken bodies of murdered children in the camp, the narrator tries to understand 96 his attitude then in the light of his present self: “I often reproach myself, I can’t understand how I could have felt nothing for the little ones back then. Although I was just a child myself, was I already so brutalized that there was nothing left in me, no sympathy, no pity, not even anger?” (105) The cumulative effect of these examples is that although we may indeed have to fill in certain facts and details as we read, our moral attitude and response to the narrator’s plight are carefully directed and manipulated. The “dots” of the underlying message of the story have already been joined by a narrator who cannot resist telling us what lessons we should be drawing from his “memories”.

Meanwhile, the book’s very structure of associative flashback also implies the adult perspective. Who else but a “grown-up” with “ordering logic” could have put together this complex narrative? There are ten different time-spaces that enclose the episodes of memory, which in “real-life” chronology are: country farmhouse, Riga, Majdanek, forced march, another concentration camp, liberation, Krakow, Swiss waiting-room, Swiss orphanage, and Swiss school. These are taken in non-chronological order and gradually revealed through the simple device of memory association. Chapter 2 sees the narrator waiting at a Swiss train station, where his temptation to trust friendly grown- ups leads to a memory of a “big gray man” in a concentration camp, who had indulged in horse-play with the narrator before turning nasty and throwing him head-first at a wall. Back in the waiting-room, everyone has left and the narrator is alone. This triggers a very brief associative flashback of being abandoned in the country farmhouse. The pattern continues throughout. Thus the narrative structure, like everything else in the book, is predicated on affect, on how each memory inspires others through the feelings they stir in the narrator. Such an approach, along with the expert way in which the time-frames and tenses are handled, helps create a high level of narrative unity. We do not feel ourselves to be at the mercy of a child’s disorganized memories, but in the hands of an expert, adult author.

The deception involved in the false claim to be giving us the unadorned child’s view is also present at the smallest level of syntax, as Sue Vice has shown. Vice argues that the narrative voice of Fragments reveals the literary rather than autobiographical nature of the text. Referring to the narrator’s statement that “I’m just an eye, taking in what it sees, giving nothing back” (Wilkomirski 87), Vice says that this 97

elides the distinction between character and narrator: the child may have been such a recording device, but it is the adult narrator who is telling the story. This utterance is an example not of reported speech or authentic testimony, but of the much more literary free indirect discourse. The narrator’s voice is present along with the character’s. (164)

While “free indirect discourse” is usually thought of only in relation to third-person narration, Vice uses it here as shorthand for her Bakhtinian notion of “double- voicedness”, in which “in each utterance there is present the representing and the represented voice” (82). The point is that throughout Wilkomirski’s narration there are two voices, adult and child, belying the narrator’s avowed intention to eliminate the former.

This intention is also rather curious in itself. As Long argues, it contradicts the usual order of narrative authority: “Wilkomirski’s narrative techniques are announced as self- consciously eschewing what we would normally regard as indispensable elements of narrative representation in order not to falsify the experience” (“Bernhard” 59-60, emphasis in original). The irony, of course, is that the experience, the story set out in Fragments, is indeed entirely “false”. There is a double deception at play here: not only are the events fictitious, but the mode of their telling is not what is claimed. As Long points out, Fragments is not a “direct representation of traumatic experience” but “rather a constructed formal analogue of traumatic recall” (59, emphasis in original). I would go further and argue that Fragments’ claim to be a representation of what is (falsely) remembered now stands revealed as an unacknowledged act of (false) remembering. It is in essence a performative gesture of deception, and remains so whether we regard its author as a calculating fraudster, deluded fantasist, artful novelist, or some combination of these.

Wilkomirski, then, falsely claims to give the unadorned perspective of a child, while also denying agency and responsibility by alleging his memories to be unwanted and intrusive. There is a third element to this litany of deception: the probability that some of Fragments’ content was taken from other sources. This plagiaristic aspect divides into three linked categories, which I will now take in turn: transformations of the real 98 past, appropriation of others’ memories and identities, and unacknowledged literary borrowings.

Maechler makes the case that some of the scenes in Fragments have roots in its author’s real memories. Maechler tracked down René Aeberhard, who was a teenager when three-year-old Bruno Grosjean was briefly fostered by Aeberhard’s family. Aeberhard, now living in America, thinks that the sections in the book about life on a Polish farmhouse are a transformed version of their brief period of childhood together in Nidau, Switzerland. Aeberhard cites several details of geographical correspondence, and also draws a parallel between his mentally unstable, sometimes aggressive mother and the vicious farmer’s wife portrayed in Fragments. From this Maechler concludes: “Wilkomirski-Grosjean did not have two heads; he had not led two lives. Instead, his book tells his own life, the life of Bruno Grosjean – but with breathtaking alienation” (229). This may or may not be provable by comparing each episode from Fragments with events from its author’s life. However, such an approach is of limited use, being essentially speculative, and reliant on conflicting claims. Indeed, Eskin, who interviewed Aeberhard again after reading Maechler’s account, implies that the Swiss émigré had anti-Semitic attitudes, and therefore “may not be an unprejudiced witness” (239). Nevertheless the psychoanalytical line of argument followed by Maechler does suggest that one element of Fragments’ falsity is a degree of self-deception in which the author’s memories have become unnaturally distorted and mingled with fantasy.

A more grave accusation is that Wilkomirski stole some of his memories from people he met during his Holocaust research and his own quest for identity. Maechler gives several examples, including that of someone Wilkomirski claims to be his friend “Mila” from Fragments. This woman now denies that she ever knew him as a child, and, worse, alleges that he pursued and befriended her before stealing and misrepresenting memories she told him in confidence: “I was his memory; he appropriated it” (qtd. in Maechler 199). Again, such accusations are of limited value as they are reliant on others’ testimony, and are based on amateur psychoanalysis of Wilkomirski from a distance. Nevertheless they do contribute to the mounting evidence of deception at the heart of Fragments. 99

The third way Wilkomirski appears to have appropriated sources outside himself is literary. As the journalist Elena Lappin noted on her visit to his countryside home, Wilkomirski has amassed an enormous personal library of Holocaust papers, books, films and photographs (16). It is possible to imagine Wilkomirski as a voracious reader who has internalized some of these texts. There are certainly easy parallels to draw on a literary level with, for example, Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird (1965). Like Fragments, this book depicts a vulnerable, victimized, yet strangely indestructible child who is subjected to a fantastic array of horrors and acts of cruelty. Other correspondences include the use of a first-person child narrator, the theme of the innate barbarity of the Polish peasantry, post-war orphanages, plagues of rats, and loss of the power of speech. As Anne Whitehead has argued, Wilkomirski probably took the idea of using a child’s-eye perspective from Kosinski. Kosinski also appears to be a plausible influence on Wilkomirski by virtue of his unconventional attitude to the distinctions between memory, history, truth and fiction. As Whitehead notes, Wilkomirski, like Kosinski, “displayed a notable tendency to internalize his own fictions as part of his process of self-invention” (9). Kosinski, like Wilkomirski, initially gained popularity for his work by inferring that it was autobiographical, before retreating behind philosophical points about the blurred boundaries between truth and storytelling. It is worth examining this link in more detail for what it reveals about Wilkomirski’s project of false remembrance.

The early critical success of The Painted Bird in the mid-1960s owed much to Kosinski spreading a rumour that it was based on his own life. Elie Wiesel, for example, commented: “I thought it was fiction, and when he told me it was autobiography I tore up my review and wrote one a thousand times better” (qtd. in Maechler 214). But in the years following publication Kosinski was regularly found pontificating about the way his book transcended simple genres. In a piece entitled “Afterward”, which prefaces the 1976 edition, he presented the book’s genesis as follows: “I decided I [. . .] would set my work in a mythic domain, in the timeless fictive present, unrestrained by geography or history” (xiii). Elsewhere, Kosinski compares The Painted Bird to Camus’ essay Return to Tipasa, in which “the literal and the symbolic approach one another so closely that from their confrontation arises the meaning” (qtd. in Vice 79). Notwithstanding such attempts to distance his text from his biography, Kosinski continued to maintain that he had indeed been separated from his parents during the war, and thereby suffered, 100 if not the exact horrors of his novel, some level of persecution and privation. An article in 198212 unearthed the truth. It turned out that he and his family had been sheltered by members of the same Polish peasantry vilified as anti-Semitic brutes in The Painted Bird. Kosinski’s credibility as an author was fatally damaged.

Wilkomirski, meanwhile, did not reach for such high-flown reasoning as Kosinski in his prevarications, instead opting for simple denial that he had ever meant his book as a truthful account. When Ganzfried broke the story, in 1998, Wilkomirski told a reporter from the Zurich Tages-Anzeiger: “It was always the free choice of the reader to read my book as literature or to take it as a personal document. Nobody has to believe me” (qtd. in Gourevitch 51). This response constitutes a refusal to take responsibility for the book’s effect. He later told Gourevitch: “I just wrote how these memories remain in a child’s memory. That’s all. If afterward people treat the book as if it were an adult expert’s report about the Holocaust, it’s completely stupid. But it’s their problem, not my problem” (qtd. in Gourevitch 52). Though Wilkomirski never says so explicitly, this denial that his work is factual implies that it can be taken as fiction. Like Kosinski, his stance is to accuse others of “stupidly” trying to match his writing to verifiable facts, while he remains aloof from such quotidian concerns.

Another Holocaust narrative of questionable veracity that may have influenced Wilkomirski is Martin Gray’s For Those I Loved. First published in France in 1971 as Au Nom de Tous les Miens, this memoir describes Gray’s experiences in the Warsaw ghetto, escape from Treblinka death camp, stint as a partisan fighter, and role as a Nazi- hunter after the war. It was ghost-written by Max Gallo. When its success led to an English translation in 1972, journalists found inconsistencies in the account and suggested that parts of it may have been fabricated. Although Gray successfully challenged this, and paperback editions and a film followed, the book later fell out of print. Eskin wrote in 2002 that “in recent years it has been more or less forgotten by everyone except those Holocaust ‘revisionists’ who invoke it as an example of the unreliability of first-person accounts of the Holocaust” (75-6). Nevertheless a “35th anniversary expanded edition” appeared in 2006, which makes virtually no reference to

12 Stokes, Geoffrey and Eliot Fremont-Smith. ‘Jerzy Kosinski’s Tainted Words’. Village Voice 22nd June 1982: 41-3. Useful overviews of the Kosinski scandal may be found in Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair 210-4, and Vice, Holocaust Fiction 67-90. Both draw on James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography (London: Plume/Penguin, 1997). 101 the former controversy. Instead, in a new foreword, the “Historian and New York Times bestselling author” Dr. William R. Forstchen tries to turn the book, rather bizarrely, into anti-Arab propaganda. Forstchen, who is best known as a sci-fi novelist and co-author of “alternative histories” with politician Newt Gingrich, writes of “the irrefutable proof that so clearly links the murderous anti-Semitism of Hitler’s thugs to the current situation in the Middle East” – this “proof” being the alleged evidence of the Grand Mufti’s collaboration in the persecution and destruction of the Jews. Linking this with Gray’s text, Forstchen goes on to assert that For Those I Loved “is more relevant [now] than when it was first published. [. . .] The evil that generated it still stalks the world today” (xii).

Gray’s book certainly appears to have been relevant to Wilkomirski. There is a striking similarity between Wilkomirski’s account of a horrific death on the streets of Riga, and Gray’s description of an incident in the Warsaw ghetto. In Fragments, Wilkomirski claims to witness an incident in which a man, “[m]aybe my father”, is murdered by “Latvian militia”, who position him in front of a wall before driving a vehicle into him: “No sound comes out of his mouth, but a big stream of something black shoots out of his neck as the transport squashes him with a big crack against the house” (6-7). In For Those I Loved, Martin Gray recalls that as a teenager in the ghetto, he “always dreamed the same dream”:

We’d arrive in a narrow street, a dead end, and my father would be standing at the end of it, standing against the wall. My mother and my brothers would run toward him, and suddenly a heavy German truck would loom up, bear down on them, about to crush them against the wall, and I couldn’t even cry out. (15)

This dream turns out to have been inspired by Martin’s memory of recently witnessing a German truck careering through the ghetto; in the aftermath he sees, “[a]gainst a wall, his arms still raised, [. . .] a man, crushed” (16). The incident in Fragments, then, appears to originate in a memory claimed by Gray in a ghost-written account whose veracity has been repeatedly challenged. It is transmuted by Gray into a dream that reflects his fears for his father, before being adapted by Wilkomirski to account for the lack of a father in his constructed story. This episode is not just another example of Wilkomirski’s deception, this time by probable plagiarism. More crucially, the myriad 102 layers of memory involved reveal just how far Fragments is from having any claim to objective truth about the past.

But this is precisely the point; Wilkomirski is making no such claim. Instead he asserts the opposite: that memories are valid and must be respected regardless of their correspondence to historical fact or circumstance, because a person’s recollections constitute his or her inviolable identity. This approach to remembrance is rooted in the young Wilkomirski’s twin interests in contemporary history and his own developing personality. During an interview, Maechler discovered that Wilkomirski undertook doctorate-level historical research after he left school, and finds that he did so “not to follow the career of a historian but to put his story into context and to understand it” (57-8). Later, Wilkomirski befriended the psychologist Eli Bernstein, with whom he concocted a “theory” of childhood memory and history that they began to present in public in the early 1990s. Addressing a perceived gap in Holocaust studies, Wilkomirski and Bernstein argued that oral testimony must be nurtured and drawn out through an “interdisciplinary” therapeutic approach involving a historian and a psychologist. The memories to be revealed by this method are those of people like “Binjamin Wilkomirski”, that is, so-called “children without identity” who emerged from World War II with no coherent past. While Bernstein took the psychologist role, Wilkomirski appears to have acted as the historian. But Wilkomirski was also their only client. Most of the examples they give in their talks are episodes from Fragments, and virtually no other “patients” appear to have taken part. As Maechler says, in this model Wilkomirski “verifies memories that he himself has constructed on the basis of his own historical research” (257). A paper given by Wilkomirski and Bernstein, cited by Maechler, is entitled: “The Child’s Memory as a Historical Source in Contemporary History, as Exemplified by Surviving Children of the Shoah.” “Memory” and “historical source” have become one.

Leaving aside the questionable merits of such an approach, the fact that it was developed at the same time that Wilkomirski was writing down his “memories” suggests that his and Bernstein’s theory was (probably unconsciously) designed to act as a defence against accusations of fictionalising his past. Maechler says that the first person to make this connection between the “memory as history” approach and the genesis of Fragments was Jörg Lau, in an article in Die Zeit on 17th September 1998. 103

Lau wrote that Fragments “was written in the spirit of a presumptuous psychotherapy that believes it can provide meaning in life, indeed an ‘identity’, by accepting, supporting, and authenticating as ‘historical reality’ anything the client may choose to offer” (qtd. in Maechler 135). Indeed, in one of their talks Wilkomirski and Bernstein assert that “the question of whether there is actual truth in the client’s early-childhood memories is irrelevant for the psychotherapist” (qtd. in Gourevitch 59-60). This of course is a distortion of the intentions of clinical practice, as Eskin points out: “The Wilkomirski-Bernstein approach treats fragments of memory as clues not only to a person’s ‘inner reality,’ the normal purview of psychotherapy, but to their ‘external reality’ as well” (84). Wilkomirski’s approach to memory also draws on concepts of trauma. As Gourevitch neatly summarizes, Wilkomirski’s defence in the face of attack was “that a strictly factual reading of ‘Fragments’ is inherently misguided, because it is a book of traumatic early memories, and that the broken and dislocated nature of such memories requires them to be taken on their own terms, as evidence of the trauma they record” (52). If this is so, then the memories can only be “evidence” of Wilkomirski’s subjectivity, in what as Gourevitch points out is a circular argument that rules out any appeal to external or objective proof.

In this respect, elements of Wilkomirski and Bernstein’s method and Wilkomirski’s practical example of Fragments may be seen to chime with the rise of memory and trauma as categories of discourse. However, critical analysis of the Wilkomirski affair has been almost entirely censorious, suggesting that the theory of childhood memory as historical source is a step too far. Most articles on Fragments give serious consideration to the question of whether it matters that Wilkomirski’s memoirs do not correspond with his actual past, and the vast majority conclude that it does, notwithstanding their traumatic value. One line of argument from the critics is that false memoirs are corrosive to human society, as they erode our faith in truth. Gourevitch, for example, calls Wilkomirski’s project an act of “memory theft”, and a “feckless literary adventure”. He paraphrases George Orwell: “every time we fail to use words with care for their truthfulness, the honesty of everything we use words to express becomes progressively forsaken” (68). Christopher Bigsby concurs, calling Fragments and other problematic memoirs acts of “betrayal” (Remembering 374). For Bigsby, the inherent instability of memory makes it an even more precious commodity: “When [memory] is appropriated, falsified, such thefts and deceptions are no misdemeanours. They work to 104 deny the common ground on which we stand and which is the necessary foundation for present actions and future prospects” (376).

Such outrage perhaps overstates the potential of literature to cause harm in the wider world. Nevertheless it usefully points to the way Fragments reveals assumptions of ethical responsibility in writing. Another criticism based on such assumptions is made by Carl Tighe, who finds the many episodes of horror and cruelty in Fragments to be obscene and even sado-masochistic. Tighe is angered by the effect of these scenes: “Wilkomirski trades on the gullibility of the reader, the willingness to believe all horrors” (95). Tighe points out that there are glaring inconsistencies and improbabilities in these episodes. For example, the excrement on the barracks floor that Wilkomirski’s friend Jankl recommends he stand in to warm his feet would in all likelihood have been icy liquid, since most of the child inmates had dysentery or diarrhoea. “To say that this is unscrupulous play with the reader’s willing belief and sympathetic emotion is an understatement. This is a kind of obscenity” (95). However, this criticism only gains its validity through the benefit of hindsight. By linking ethical responsibility to probability in narration, Tighe is perhaps on shaky ground. If Fragments had been published as fiction, would his opinion have been the same? Tighe’s outrage is perhaps more the result of indignation at having been deceived than any clear ethics of representation.

Another line of criticism is based on literary conventions. Wilkomirski is held to have broken Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact” or contract with the reader. He is also taken to task for transgressing the boundaries of genre. Robert Eaglestone, for example, complains that Fragments is both “parasitic” on, and a “parody” of, the genres of fiction and memoir (127). Susan Suleiman, meanwhile, criticizes the book for denying the existence of categories: “Wilkomirski’s book does not play with categories – it obfuscates them, which is not the same thing. The problem with Fragments, as a text, is precisely that it does not recognize, or at any rate does not admit, its own fictionality” (169, emphasis in original). Suleiman here seems to demand an element of self- consciousness or self-reflexivity, and this is indeed what is lacking in Fragments and which is so prevalent in works by Sebald and Foer examined in later chapters of the present study. 105

For other critics, however, form and genre are beside the point. Omer Bartov reminds us that earlier Holocaust memoirists, such as Tadeusz Borowski, Ida Fink, and Imre Kertész, fictionalized their accounts to varying extents without causing widespread outrage. The reason for this is that they were verifiably actually there in the camps and ghettos, rather than safe in, for example, Swiss foster-homes. “Hence,” Bartov writes, “the point is not merely fiction or truth, but presence or absence” (38). According to this argument, our response to Fragments is conditioned by basic assumptions of authenticity based on a reverence for the eye-witness who was present at the event in question. Thus, the value of a writer like Borowski is that his readers may vicariously witness the event for themselves through his text, whereas in Wilkomirski’s case they merely gain access to the author’s imagination. This argument is based on a further assumption: that Borowski’s memory can give us accurate access to the past. However, if one takes the opposite view, that memory is intrinsically unstable, partial, and untrustworthy, it is possible to argue that the veracity or otherwise of Fragments is irrelevant. Michael Bernard-Donals takes this stance, arguing that Wilkomirski’s text should be taken as a reminder that all remembrance is an illusion:

[. . .] the effect of the narrative in Fragments is not to remember the Holocaust – we were not there, so we cannot remember it. Rather, in the face of the event’s retreat into an irrecuperable past, we are required to bear witness to a trauma that forced Bruno Dössekker to choose the language of the disaster to stand in for a disaster of his own. Clearly his story doesn’t give us access to the historical details he purports to describe. But it does provide us with access to the structure of witness and the risks involved in testimony. (134)

Bernard-Donals takes the position that the very nature of (traumatic) memory precludes any need to justify itself in relation to historical truth, which is precisely the argument put forward by Wilkomirski and Bernstein in their theory of childhood memory and history. Moreover, by focusing on the “structure of witness”, Bernard-Donals elides the ethical and epistemological problems of historical knowledge in order to promote testimony as a genre. As a consequence, despite seeming to denigrate memory for its inability to access to the past, Bernard-Donals in fact exalts it for the way it strips away the so-called illusion that there are historical “facts” to which one may lay claim.

This focus on memory-as-testimony has its roots in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992). 106

Asserting that “our era can precisely be defined as the age of testimony” (5), Felman and Laub emphasize both the therapeutic and epistemological value of taking the voice of the witness seriously. Laub cites the case of a survivor who witnessed the Auschwitz uprising. This woman, now in late middle age, remembered that four chimneys were exploded during the action, but historians, when shown her videotaped testimony, pointed out that in fact it was only one, and thus considered her account invalid. However, for the psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor Laub, factual inaccuracy does not weaken her testimony. For him, the important point is the effect on the woman of the enormity of the event, the incredible fact that anyone managed to rebel at all in such conditions. For Laub, she “was testifying not simply to empirical historical facts, but to the very secret of survival and of resistance to extermination” (“Bearing” 62). Here we can note Laub’s certainty that the historians are wrong in their emphasis on objective truth, and his confidence that there is a more nebulous “secret” to be unveiled through close attention to the nature of testimony. Gillian Banner, citing the same chimney example, agrees with this position in her book Holocaust Literature: Schulz, Levi, Spiegelman and the Memory of the Offence (2000). Banner argues: “It is in the meeting-place of discrepant memories that we will find truths which transcend the merely historical” (13). The promotion of memory over history could not be clearer. Banner draws heavily on Lawrence Langer’s Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (1991), in which Langer urges that we should learn to “hear” the voices of survivors, as transmitted in the video interviews collected by the Fortunoff Project, rather than project our own stories of survival and heroism onto them. For Langer, close attention to both their words and manner of speech reveals troubling and unresolved problems of “divided” and “diminished” selves for whom the Holocaust will never be over. I deal with this argument in more detail in the next chapter.

Commentators like Laub, Langer and Banner, then, privilege the testimony of survivors over the projections and viewpoints of those who come after. Moreover, for these writers, the key attribute of testimony is its affective force. Rather than criticising emotions for obstructing rational thought, as traditional historiography might (see Hilberg, above), the affective power of traumatic memories is held to offer a key to the experience of the Holocaust unobtainable by documents and objective hindsight. Paradoxically, however, the extreme traumatic nature of this experience leads to the claim that it was not witnessed as it occurred. As noted in Chapter 1 of the present 107 study, Laub argues that “the inherently incomprehensible and deceptive psychological structure of [the Holocaust] precluded its own witnessing, even by its very victims” (“Event” 80). For Laub, it is only in the later moment of testimony that the event is witnessed for the first time. Such a contention is based on a problematic view of traumatic memory which holds that all experience is inherently belated. Testimony, trauma, and memory are thus inter-related concepts in a line of thinking which moves from the valorisation of Holocaust witnesses, to an emphasis on subjectivity and affect, to the possibility of a “Binjamin Wilkomirski”, and finally to the defence of Fragments by Bernard-Donals on abstract theoretical grounds.

This entire frame of reference is critiqued in an important article by Andrew S. Gross and Michael J. Hoffman, “Memory, Authority, and Identity: Holocaust Studies in the Light of the Wilkomirski Debate” (2004). Gross and Hoffman analyse what the Wilkomirski affair reveals about the critical investment in testimony as a genre. They argue that the affective power of testimony has become “authority”, replacing “authenticity” as the means by which texts are evaluated. Thus, “we might provisionally define ‘authority’ as a subject-position made unquestionable by virtue of its suffering” (33). Gross and Hoffman seek to defend historical knowledge against this growing affective authority of testimony and memory. Nevertheless, although the emphasis on memory may be “at the price [. . .] of historical ignorance” (37), it does not necessarily follow that the integrity of Holocaust studies is threatened:

The inaccuracy of [Wilkomirski’s memories] does not plunge us into a historical crisis for the same reason that any number of make-believe Napoleons do not discredit Waterloo. Rather, unstable memories plunge those who identify with those memories into a crisis of identity. If we identified with [Wilkomirski] as a victim, we are also implicated in his delusions of victimization. (42)

That is, by privileging the affective power of testimony we risk losing objective critical judgement, as seen in exemplary fashion during the initial reception of Fragments. Gross and Hoffman go on to suggest that this over-emphasis on the individual suffering subject may perniciously obfuscate or divert attention from the wider socio-political sphere, reducing the possibility of usefully addressing such problems as Israeli foreign policy and how the United States should deal with its legacy of slavery. Gross and Hoffman’s agenda reveals a fear that “history”, in the sense of attention to the wider 108 picture, is under threat from “memory”, in its restricted focus on the victim. It also serves to remind us of the high stakes attendant on this sometimes arcane philosophical debate.

Fragments, then, has served as a test case and meeting point for the memory-history debate. A very different text which nevertheless highlights similar problems attendant on emphasising memory over history is Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces (1996). Like Fragments, this novel centres on the memories of a child survivor of the Holocaust. As in Wilkomirski’s text, it relies on a trope of fragmentation, in which broken “pieces” of memory are posited as symptoms of trauma to be healed through narrativization. However, where Fragments makes great claims for memory (which are at their very root deceptive), Fugitive Pieces advances more subtle arguments, figuring memory as a) transmissible, b) redemptive, and c) akin to witness. All three of these are challenged in the following analysis.

Anne Michaels was born in Toronto in 1958. Marita Grimwood writes in the online Literary Encyclopedia that Michaels “has consistently refused to let details of her personal life shift the focus of attention away from her writing” and has always declined “to supply any but the most basic biographical information”. However, some details have emerged. The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature states that Michaels’ father was a “Russian immigrant”, while Grimwood says that he “came from a Polish- Jewish family and left the Polish-Russian border in 1931 at the age of 13 to settle in Canada”. Unfortunately, we do not know the extent to which Michaels identifies with this Jewish heritage, nor whether other relatives were left behind to suffer under Nazi or Soviet regimes. Thus her relationship to the Holocaust may only be inferred from her writings, which consist of three volumes of poetry (The Weight of Oranges [1986], Miner’s Pond [1991], and Skin Divers [1999]), a few articles, and Fugitive Pieces itself, to date her only novel (though a second, The Winter Vault, is due in 2009). Across this oeuvre one theme is ever-present: memory – its meanings, uses, and metaphorical utility.

Indeed, a preoccupation with methods of remembrance informs the very structure of Fugitive Pieces. In the prologue, unnamed as such, a third-person narrator states that although “countless manuscripts” from World War II were lost or destroyed, some were 109 nevertheless “recovered, by circumstance alone”. Instead of such wartime artifacts, however, the novel presents us with the ostensible memoirs of a child survivor of the Holocaust, written in the 1980s and 1990s, which are recovered by a young acolyte after the survivor’s death. Thus Fugitive Pieces is narrated first by the survivor, a poet named Jakob Beer, and then by his literary executor, Ben, himself the son of (different) survivors. This structure firmly embeds memory into the narrative and plot. Ben keeps Jakob’s memory alive through the retrieval and publication of his writings. Ben’s parents, Holocaust survivors who kept largely silent about their experiences, are memorialized in their son’s account. Meanwhile, Jakob preserves the memory of his adoptive father, the archaeologist Athos Roussos, by completing and publishing his unfinished works. Jakob also memorializes his sister, Bella, from whom he was irrevocably separated during the Nazi raid that killed his parents, but who remains as a ghostly presence in his journal. Finally, Athos himself, in his book “Bearing False Witness”, seeks to preserve the memory of Biskupin, the archaeological site desecrated by the Nazis because it contradicted their account of “Aryan” history.

This emphasis on the preservation of memory is sustained throughout the novel in archaeological metaphors that Michaels, through her narrators, nevertheless attempts to disavow as such. Here, for example, Jakob is musing on how the memory of Holocaust victims may be preserved:

It’s no metaphor to feel the influence of the dead in the world, just as it’s no metaphor to hear the radiocarbon chronometer, the Geiger counter amplifying the faint breathing of rock, fifty thousand years old (like the faint thump from behind the womb wall). It is no metaphor to witness the astonishing fidelity of minerals magnetized, even after hundreds of millions of years, pointing to the magnetic pole, minerals that have never forgotten magma whose cooling off has left them forever desirous. We long for place; but place itself longs. Human memory is encoded in air currents and river sediment. Eskers of ask wait to be scooped up, lives reconstituted. (53)

This passage attempts to anthropomorphize nature. Froma Zeitlin glosses it as follows: “Nature does not forget. Landscape is personified; it can be wounded by destructive upheavals [. . .]; and it, too, solicits grief and empathy” (187). But if nature does not forget, it must have some kind of “memory”. Rocks may carry the “trace” of radiation from years ago, but is this simple phenomenon really akin to the complex workings of (collective) human memory? What exactly does river sediment “remember”? 110

Elsewhere, Michaels has developed this idea of “geologic memory” in relation to architectural stone. In an article published in 1997, she writes: “Like human memory, geologic memory can be a weakness or a strength. If building materials ‘remember’ the quarry or the forge, so a site remembers its past. There’s nothing mystical in this; it’s a pragmatic analysis of forces” (“Phantom Limbs”). Michaels’ disavowal of the metaphorical and mystical consequences of her ideas does not bear sustained analysis. Jakob’s wishful thinking in the passage above, in which Holocaust victims’ memories are somehow preserved in air, mud and rock, seems to suggest that their deaths are not absolute, particularly if a writer like him is around to “scoop up” the “ash” and “reconstitute” their lives in prose. With this passage, Michaels seems to suggest that the very configuration of the world and the cosmos will ensure that the Holocaust is never forgotten. However, by this token, all deaths and catastrophes, being likewise part of the wider scheme of things, will equally live on forever; this leaves the author open to the charge of Holocaust relativism. Though this is probably not her intention, it is there; it results from her attempt to conflate poetic sensibility with scientific research, to try to understand the Holocaust by situating it in the known world of phenomena.

Michaels’ approach also relies on problematic notions of secondary or vicarious witnessing. Elsewhere in Fugitive Pieces she goes further in her claims for the power of memory. In the following passage, Jakob is pondering how meaning may be extracted from the Holocaust:

The event is only meaningful if the coordination of time and space is witnessed. Witnessed by those who lived near the incinerators, within the radius of smell. By those who lived outside the camp fence, or stood outside the chamber doors. By those who stepped a few feet to the right on the station platform. By those who were born a generation after. (162, emphasis mine)

Here Jakob appears to equate survivors of the camps with people born after the war. As the former draw on memory, the latter on imagination, this implies equivalence between the two faculties. Like Wilkomirski’s claim that his “memories” are valid regardless of their correspondence to historical fact, this conflation of memory and imagination under the heading of witness obfuscates important ethical distinctions between truth and fiction. This in turn leads to an implied claim that the author of fiction about the Holocaust has the same status as one who gives testimony first-hand. But the question 111 of who are the “true witnesses” to the event must always be seen in the light of Primo Levi’s distinction between the sommersi (drowned) and the salvati (saved). Levi wrote:

I must repeat – we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. This is an uncomfortable notion, of which I have become conscious little by little, reading the memoirs of others and reading mine at a distance of years. We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the ‘Muslims’, the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception. (Drowned 63-4)

If even Levi, as a salvati Auschwitz survivor, refuses to claim “complete” status as a witness, how can those who were not alive then, such as Ben, or Michaels herself, do so? In this light, the suggestion that the event can be made “meaningful” through second-hand witnessing appears specious and presumptuous.

Nicola King, analysing Michaels’ passage quoted above, addresses the relation between Levi and Michaels as follows:

Here he [Jakob] implicitly agrees with Primo Levi, for whom the survivors were not the true witnesses, but who nevertheless felt the responsibility to bear witness. It is a member of the ‘generation after’, his student Ben, who finds his memoirs and thus becomes his witness. The author thus builds the question of ‘who bears witness for the witness?’ into the structure of her narrative. (“We Come” 103)

Though Fugitive Pieces does indeed build vicarious witnessing into its narrative, there is surely a difference between Levi’s position as survivor and Ben’s position as the son of survivors. Levi’s argument that he is not a true witness highlights the fact that he did not experience the Holocaust in the same way as, for example, someone who died in the gas chamber. It does not deny that he witnessed, in the sense of seeing with his own eyes, what happened at Auschwitz. Levi’s position should be considered qualitatively different from that of Wilkomirski or Michaels, something which more self-reflexive texts, such as those by Sebald and Foer, implicitly and explicitly acknowledge. These latter authors self-consciously problematize their status as witnesses while nevertheless exploring their urge to bear witness for the witness, as later chapters of the present study will show. 112

Interestingly, the claims of second-hand witness do have some medical backing. David Pillemer, a Professor of Developmental Psychology, cites clinical evidence that secondary witnesses, for example those who saw the events of “9/11” on television, or who watched films of nuclear fallout in Hiroshima, can suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder in the same way as those who experienced the events more directly. This is because they create new memories for themselves whilst watching the material. Pillemer writes: “Vivid memories, once created, carry with them an emotional intensity that energizes future beliefs and behaviors, and this appears to be the case whether the trauma was direct or indirect” (148). Another scientific article on the subject notes that the 1994 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM- IV) changed the criteria for trauma. “To qualify as trauma exposed, one no longer needs to be a direct victim. As long as one is confronted with a situation that involves threat to the physical integrity of one’s self or others and one experiences the emotions of fear, horror, or helplessness, then the experience counts as exposure to a PTSD- qualifying stressor” (McNally et al. 47, emphasis mine). If this is so, it is possible to argue that Michaels’ representative of the “generation after”, Ben, by being “confronted” daily with the after-effects of Holocaust trauma in his parents, experiences a comparable trauma that is just as clinically valid. Nevertheless this must be distinguished from witnessing the experience as survivors did. To deny this differentiation leads inexorably towards justifying the actions of a Wilkomirski.

A more subtle example of the way the problem of witness is foregrounded in Michaels’ novel is in the circumstances of Jakob’s Holocaust experience. The little boy does not see the murder of his parents, but he hears it. When soldiers raid his home, he hides:

I was still small enough to vanish behind the wallpaper in the cupboard, cramming my head sideways between choking plaster and beams, eyelashes scraping. [. . .] The burst door. Wood ripped from hinges, cracking like ice under the shouts. Noises never heard before, torn from my father’s mouth. Then silence. My mother had been sewing a button on my shirt. She kept her buttons in a chipped saucer. I heard the rim of the saucer in circles on the floor. I heard the spray of buttons, little white teeth. (6-7) 113

Thus Jakob hears various noises before emerging to find his parents lying dead. This will haunt him in a specific way; as he says later, “I did not witness the most important events of my life” (17). For Dalia Kandiyoti, this statement is “paradigmatic of the hidden or very young child survivor, who, unlike adult survivors of atrocities, cannot bear witness in the same way and always has to imagine the invisible” (310). This is reminiscent of Wilkomirski’s claims that memories of child survivors deserve different and more sympathetic treatment than those of adults, and that memory and imagination carry equal weight.

Meanwhile, in Michaels’ schema, memory is not only analogous to (traumatized) witness, but also, crucially, transmissible. The past is thought to be transmitted to us in the present, whether through the radiation of rocks, or the “memory” of nature, as in the examples above. Such ideas of transmission or transference are also expressed in Fugitive Pieces as a poetic vision of memories passed on through love, which involves a transcendence of the border between self and other. Jakob, describing his love for his second wife, writes: “I cross over the boundary of skin into Michaela’s memories, into her childhood” (185). Meanwhile, according to Ben, the frontier is crossed in the opposite direction during the act of biography: “The quest to discover another’s psyche, to absorb another’s motives as your own, is a lover’s quest” (222). Or it may be a simple matter of knowledge. In order to emphasize how well he understands his wife, Ben claims: “I know what she remembers. I know her memories” (285). This appears presumptuous; elsewhere the process verges on the appropriative. Athos, in desperate sympathy for young Jakob’s nightmares, says: “Jakob, I long to steal your memories from you while you’re sleeping, to siphon off your dreams” (92). These are all moments of over-identification, fantasies in which the other is transferred into the self, or the self into the other. Indeed, they are reminiscent of Max Scheler’s ideas of “heteropathic” and “idiopathic” identification, which, as I showed in Chapter 2 of the present study, were disapproved of by Scheler himself, and later adopted by Kaja Silverman only in terms of a radical sexual politics. As such, these modes of extreme identification are inappropriate models for Holocaust representation when compared with LaCaprian empathy, which seeks to maintain the border between self and other rather than encourage its breach. 114

The most extreme claim in Fugitive Pieces for memory transference, and consequently of over-identification, arises from Jakob’s Holocaust research. Here he is considering the fate of those who had the task of exhuming corpses:

When the prisoners were forced to dig up the mass graves, the dead entered them through their pores and were carried through their bloodstreams to their brains and hearts. And through their blood into another generation. Their arms were into death up to the elbows, but not only into death – into music, into a memory of the way a husband or son leaned over his dinner, a wife’s expression as she watched her child in the bath; into beliefs, mathematical formulas, dreams. As they felt another man’s and another’s blood-soaked hair through their fingers, the diggers begged forgiveness. And those lost lives made molecular passage into their hands. (52)

Later, this grotesque idea is repeated more succinctly: “They dug the bodies out of the ground. They put their bare hands not only into death, not only into the syrups and bacteria of the body, but into emotions, beliefs, confessions. One man’s memories then another’s, thousands whose lives it was their duty to imagine” (279, emphasis in original). As memories and emotions do not, literally, remain with decaying corpses, and are therefore not available for “molecular” transmission, this passage can only mean that the personal memories and emotions of the dead were (re-)created by the diggers, in fulfilment of their “duty to imagine” the lives of the deceased. By extension, Michaels implies that we all have a duty to recreate, through invention, the thoughts of the dead, perhaps because they, murdered before their time, are unable to pass on their memories through normal channels. Thus the project of writing Holocaust fiction is defended on ethical grounds. But by making such an extreme claim for the power of memory transmission, Michaels risks an ethically dubious identification with victims. In the next chapter I show how W. G. Sebald avoids this problem by repeatedly stating, through the voice of his narrative persona, that he “could not imagine” what it was like for the victims of the past. Michaels’ narrative suggests the opposite: that we must try to imagine the unimaginable. There is an important difference between being willing to confront the horrors of the past in a general way, and over-identifying with the perceived suffering of victims to the extent that emotions overwhelm rational thought. The empathic balance between objectivity and subjectivity, distance and proximity, is unlikely to be achieved by overstating the memorialising potential of memory transmission through such channels as rocks, love, or blood. An over-emphasis on the transferable qualities of memory is ultimately at the expense of more critical modes of 115 thought. As Gross and Hoffman argue in their critique of the rise of memory as testimony: “transference, and experiential connection between people, [has taken precedence] over reference, the semantic connection between symbol and event” (37). Moreover, the tendency to seek solace by such means, though understandable, must be resisted. As King says of Michaels’ theory of memory transmission through the blood, “the suggestion of a kind of immortality strikes me as a false consolation” (“We Come” 106). And it may even obfuscate the very events to which it refers; Middleton and Woods argue that Michaels’ approach constitutes a “consolatory fantasy that actually hides some of the horror” (40).

Sue Vice, analysing similarly “transcendent” moments in Fugitive Pieces, concludes that “this seems to be a way of trying to wring aesthetic and meaningful comfort from an event which offers no redemption of any kind” (9). However, Michaels’ central theme is precisely redemption, figured as achievable through the power of memory. Jakob’s life as a Holocaust survivor is one of mental suffering eventually redeemed by drawing on his past to write valuable poetry, and by finding love with a second wife to whom he can unburden himself. Meanwhile, Ben’s anguish, resulting from his emotionally stunted childhood, is redeemed by his work of preserving Jakob’s memory, which in turn leads to Ben’s realization of how to become happy with his wife (“I see that I must give what I most need” [294]). In an article written in the same year as Fugitive Pieces, Michaels muses on the redemptive power of memory:

Memory, like love, gains strength through restatement, reaffirmation, in a culture, through ritual, tradition, stories, art. Memory courts our better selves. It helps us recognize the importance of deed: we learn from pleasure just as we learn from pain. And when memory evokes consideration of what might have been or been prevented, memory becomes redemptive. As Yehudi Amichai wrote: “to remember is a kind of hope”. (“Cleopatra’s Love” 181)

This brings to mind Yerushalmi’s view of collective Jewish memory, which is here seen as a force powerful enough to redeem the past. In Fugitive Pieces, Jakob argues that this quality stems from its oppositional relation to “History”:

History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral: what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers. History is the Totenbuch, the Book of the Dead, kept by the administrators of the camps. Memory is the 116

Memorbucher, the names of those to be mourned, read aloud in the synagogue. (138)

Thus Michaels, through Jakob, refutes Hilberg’s dictum that documentary evidence is the only worthwhile source for understanding the past. But the example given of the Totenbuch is problematic in several ways. Firstly, if we extend the abstract concept “history” to its practitioners, historians, Michaels may appear to be aligning them with genocidal Nazi administrators. Secondly, this Totenbuch was not amoral as such; it was compiled with an agenda in mind, albeit one now usually considered immoral. Thirdly, can it really be true to say that anyone, even the most objective historian, even a Hilberg, can write with complete detachment, with no operation of conscience? Why is conscience only available to those who mourn in the synagogue and not to those who investigate facts and figures? Should history therefore be abandoned in favour of memory on moral grounds?

Both Fugitive Pieces and Fragments, then, claim that the power of memory should take precedence over the historical facts of presence and absence. These texts show that the aggrandizement of memory leads towards a morally naïve and ethically dubious worldview which in turn creates problematic representations of the Holocaust. By creating a false opposition between memory and history, Wilkomirski and Michaels reduce the available options to a stark choice between over-identification and over-objectification. Thus both Wilkomirski and Michaels arrive at a questionable over-identification with victims rather than an empathic balance between proximity and distance. The following chapters examine texts which to varying extents resolve this problem through self- reflexive narrative techniques. 117

Chapter 4

A simultaneous gesture of proximity and distance: the empathic narrative persona in W. G. Sebald’s “Paul Bereyter” and Austerlitz

W. G. Sebald’s prose narratives exist at the borderline of the novel form. Their self- conscious hybridity, combining memoir, historical account, travelogue and fiction, may be seen as pushing the boundaries of genre. But Sebald’s use of a narrator-figure with some biographical correspondence to the author, who takes part in the action, enables an even greater crossing of borders: those between past and present, memory and history, and current and previous generations. In this chapter, I argue that through the use of what I call an “empathic narrative persona”, Sebald engages with, and to an extent transcends, the ethical and epistemological problems of Holocaust representation, in particular the dangers of identification with victims. I focus on two representative texts: the story of “Paul Bereyter” from Die Ausgewanderten (1993; translated as The Emigrants in 1996), and the novel-length Austerlitz (2001). These examples have useful correlations, not least their shared concern with exile and loss. Sebald himself noted the connection: “You might almost describe [Austerlitz] as a sequel to The Emigrants” (Bigsby, “In Conversation” 162). By situating these narratives in the context of the Sebaldian persona, I show how the author self-reflexively foregrounds the process of LaCaprian empathy by establishing close personal connection with the victims of history while simultaneously constructing texts that are characterized by several layers of structural and epistemological distance. In this way he approaches the horrors of the Holocaust in an oblique manner that neither over-identifies with nor objectifies its victims.

That Sebald was conscious of such ethical issues is shown by his comments in interviews. For example:

Anything one does in the form of writing, and especially prose fiction, is not an innocent enterprise. It is a morally questionable enterprise because one is, of course in the business – however honest one attempts to be as a writer – of arranging things in such a way that the role of the narrator is not an entirely despicable one. There is no way around this. [. . .]. Writing is by definition a morally dubious occupation, I think, because one appropriates and manipulates the lives of others for certain ends. When it is a question of the lives of those 118

who have survived persecution the process of appropriation can be very invasive. (Bigsby, “In Conversation” 153)

Nevertheless, the subject central to much of Sebald’s work is precisely “the lives of those who have survived persecution”. So the question is: how does he deal with the problems of appropriation and invasion, and what part does the “role of the narrator” play in this negotiation?

The “I”-figure is a major element in Sebald’s work. This narrator imposes himself on the first pages of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz, and only waits until the second section of Vertigo, “All’estero”, to make his presence felt. His multiple functions include the describing of hallucinatory travels through Suffolk and Central Europe, including a return to the village of his childhood; the recounting of journeys of the mind through philosophy, literature and history; acts of meeting, listening to and recording the memories of exiles and emigrants, and their friends and relatives, both real and fictional; and the investigation of sites of both historical and personal importance. The narrator-figure brings all these elements together, in a powerful personal vision of destruction and decay. Structurally, meanwhile, he narrates the past of his travels and encounters, while simultaneously appearing as the present writer of his narration. He offers personal biographical information: “In the second half of the 1960s I travelled repeatedly from England to Belgium” (Austerlitz 1); “Until my twenty-sixth year I had never been further away from home than a five- or six-hour train journey” (Emigrants 149). He also recounts detailed insights into his physical and psychological condition, fearing at one stage that “mental paralysis was taking hold of me” (Vertigo 36), while at another being “alarmed by what I feared was the progressive decline of my eyesight” (Austerlitz 47). Despite these details he remains obscure, a “shadowy pronoun” (Atlas 283), a “spectral annunciatory presence that engenders the texts” (Blackler 93).

Susan Sontag argues that Sebald’s narrator is a relatively familiar figure, “the promeneur solitaire of many generations of romantic literature” (3). Another way we might situate him in terms of tradition is by comparison with Walter Benjamin’s “Storyteller”, who, like the Sebaldian narrator, embeds himself in the stories he tells. For Benjamin, storytelling 119

does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel. Storytellers tend to begin their story with a presentation of the circumstances in which they themselves have learned what is to follow. (91)

On one level, this is exactly what the Sebaldian “I”-figure does. In Rings of Saturn, it is the narrator’s walk across Suffolk that frames the story. Austerlitz begins with an account of the circumstances by which the narrator came to be in the Antwerp waiting- room in which he first meets the protagonist. Meanwhile, part of the function of the narrator of The Emigrants is to show how he came upon the stories he is to tell. However, this personalisation is but one element of the Sebaldian narrator, who as this chapter will show is a complex and innovative construction designed for the particular situation of the late twentieth century writer who looks back on that century’s horrors.

In order more clearly to define the Sebaldian narrator it may help to compare his details with the author’s biography, as the two are so intimately connected. Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald, “Max” to friends and colleagues, was born on 18 May 1944 in Wertach im Allgäu, a village in the Bavarian Alps of Germany. Before he reached double figures his family moved to nearby Sonthofen. Large numbers of Sebald’s forebears had immigrated to New York in the 1920s, including all his mother’s siblings. Sebald has described his parents as being from “conventional, Catholic, anti-communist backgrounds” (Jaggi 6). His father found advancement in the army during the Nazi period and participated in the Polish campaign at the beginning of World War II. His late return in 1947, after being held as a prisoner of war in France, meant that he initially seemed a stranger to his infant son. After this difficult beginning the two had a strained relationship. Moreover, the father’s refusal to speak about his wartime experiences was a key factor in his son’s increasing interest in the subject. Sebald was once asked whether he ever resolved matters with his father, and responded: “We never had that conversation. You didn’t know what your parents had done, but, perhaps more decisively, you didn’t even know what they had seen or not seen. And the question, to mind now, is: What did they witness? What did they see?” (Bigsby, “In Conversation” 143) Thus while Sebald appears to have given up on ever finding out whether his father took part in atrocities, he has transmuted his personal conflicts and intellectual curiosity 120 into his writing, both in the prose narratives analysed in this chapter and in his analysis of post-war German consciousness, as in the lectures on “Air War and Literature” which appeared in English, alongside other essays, as On The Natural History of Destruction (2003).

From 1963-6 Sebald studied German and comparative literature in Germany and Switzerland. While at Freiburg University he followed the Frankfurt trial of former Auschwitz personnel, and experienced an awakening to the recent history he had previously ignored. Disenchanted with central Europe, from 1966-70 he worked as a Lektor or German language assistant at the University of Manchester, apart from a year schoolteaching in Switzerland. He married an Austrian, Ute, in 1967; they had one daughter, Anna, who became a teacher. In 1970 he settled permanently in England, taking a job at the University of East Anglia in Norwich as a Lecturer in German Literature. Apart from a brief stint at the Goethe Institute in Munich during 1975, he remained for the rest of his life at UEA, receiving a Personal Chair in European Literature in 1988. Having hitherto published only academic material, Sebald began to write more personal work in the late 1980s, beginning with the long poem Nach der Natur: Ein Elementargedicht (1988), translated as After Nature (2002). Fragments of prose that he had been assembling began to appear in print, progressively increasing in narrative coherence. Schwindel. Gefühle (1990) was translated as Vertigo (1999); Die Ausgewanderten (1993) as The Emigrants (1996); and Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine Englische Wallfahrt (1995) as The Rings of Saturn (1998). When visited by the writer James Atlas in 1999, he was living in “a redbrick Victorian manor with tall windows and a manicured lawn in a suburban cul-de-sac on the outskirts of Norwich” (Atlas 288). Sebald died in a car crash on 14 December 2001, shortly after the publication of Austerlitz, a book that came closer to the form of a novel than any of his previous works. Campo Santo, a collection of prose fragments and essays, appeared posthumously in 2003, and was translated into English in 2005.

For comparison, a partial “biography” of the Sebaldian narrator may be constructed by referring across all four complete prose narratives. For example, we learn about his place of birth during the long final section of Vertigo, “Il ritorno in patria”, which recounts a visit to the German village of “W”, “where I had not been since my childhood” (171). In the “Paul Bereyter” section of The Emigrants, meanwhile, we hear 121 about the narrator’s later childhood in the nearby town of “S”. These two single-letter towns, which appear throughout his books, would appear to refer to Sebald’s real childhood homes of Wertach im Allgäu and Sonthofen, yet according to the author they “have more of a symbolic significance than anything [. . .] in the texts they are in fact imaginary locations” (Bigsby, “In Conversation” 141). While this statement may be influenced by a desire not to offend or compromise the real inhabitants of Wertach and Sonthofen, it does not quite account for the feebleness of the disguise. In each of the books, the author’s biography offered by the publisher names his birthplace, so it does not take a large amount of detective work on the part of the reader to match it up to “W”.

This ambiguity of purpose is repeated in other aspects of the narrator’s biography. His basic history usually, but not always, matches that of Sebald. In the story of “Max Ferber” in The Emigrants, the narrator arrives in Manchester in 1966, and describes how he “left the city in the summer of 1969 to follow a plan I had long had of becoming a schoolteacher in Switzerland” (176). These facts chime perfectly with Sebald’s biography. But the “All’estero” section of Vertigo contradicts this: “In October 1980 I travelled from England, where I had then been living for nearly twenty-five years” (33). Sebald, and indeed the narrator of “Max Ferber”, had only been living there for fourteen years, so there is not even consistency between the narratives, let alone between Sebald and his narrator.

Another dimension to the narrator’s biography is that of friends and relatives. Sebald has confirmed that the story of “Ambros Adelwarth” in The Emigrants is based on his real great-uncle. In an interview he stated that, as in the published narrative, “there was within my family another story and that is the story of all my uncles and aunts who left southern Bavaria in the late 20s, during the Great Depression, to go to New York” (Turner 22). The telling of “Ambros Adelwarth”, as with most Sebaldian texts, involves using the narrator’s story as a framing narrative. He recounts how, despite developing an “aversion to all things American” in his teenage years, he “did eventually fly to Newark on the 2nd of January 1981. This change of heart was prompted by a photograph album of my mother’s which had come into my hands a few months earlier and which contained pictures quite new to me of our relatives who had emigrated during the Weimar years” (Emigrants 71). However, the photograph reproduced on this page, 122 of a family at table, is not of Sebald’s relatives, a fact the reader could not know without having read interviews with the author. The precision of the date and the apparent authentication provided by the photograph prove to be highly misleading. Sebald has not just changed the names of his relatives to preserve anonymity; he has included photographs of unknown others to stand in for them. Other personal connections that flit in and out of the books include the real writer Michael Hamburger (in Rings of Saturn) and the narrator’s partner “Clara”, who participates in small but notable ways in Vertigo and The Emigrants. If Clara corresponds in any way to Sebald’s real wife Ute – which is not known, but possible, given how others are used – why does she take on a different name while Hamburger retains his own? Indeed, naming varies throughout Sebald’s oeuvre. “Paul Bereyter” is the real name of Sebald’s teacher from Sonthofen, but “Max Ferber” and “Austerlitz” are invented names signifying composites of people known to the author and public figures alive and dead. (“Ferber”, or “Auerbach” in the German original, comprises the painter Frank Auerbach and Sebald’s 1960s Manchester landlord. “Austerlitz” combines an anonymous architectural historian friend of the author and the Kindertransport survivor Susi Bechhöfer.) Inconsistency and ambiguity are once again the hallmark of Sebald’s use of names and people.

My final example of the shifting relationship between author and narrator relates to the opening of Rings of Saturn:

In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work. And in fact my hope was realized, up to a point; for I have seldom felt so carefree as I did then, walking for hours in the day through the thinly populated countryside [. . .]. I wonder now, however, whether there might be something in the old superstition that certain ailments of the spirit and of the body are particularly likely to beset us under the sign of the Dog Star. At all events, in retrospect I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralysing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place. Perhaps it was because of this that, a year to the day after I began my tour, I was taken into hospital in Norwich in a state of almost total immobility. (3)

“Dispelling the emptiness”, “ailments of the spirit”, “paralysing horror”, “state of almost total immobility”: the cumulative effect of these phrases is surely to encourage 123 the idea that the narrator’s internment in hospital, revealed on the next page, is the result of psychological or emotional disturbance. This is compounded by the next section, which describes the narrator’s increasingly tenuous hold on reality. Indeed, as Maya Jaggi relates, “one reviewer assumed he had been incarcerated in a mental asylum” (6). Yet as Sebald explained:

“Walking along the seashore [of East Anglia] was not comfortable – one foot was always lower than the other. I had a pain, and the following summer, I stretched, and something broke in my back.” Threatened with paralysis, he had a four-hour operation for a shattered disc. (Jaggi 6)

Thus Sebald has taken a prosaic incident from his own life and subtly transformed it for his “I”-narrator into some more nebulous, suggestive, and literary. The exact relationship between author and narrator is never set fast, but hovers in a state of ambiguous uncertainty.

How then might we begin to define this ambiguous narrator? The vocabulary of narrative theory might add clarity. In Genette’s terms, he is clearly a homodiegetic (present within the story) narrator. But is he the hero of his tale (autodiegetic), or the observer-witness? The latter seems most plausible, yet he is more than merely a “bystander” (Genette 245), given his level of personal involvement and complicity. These categories begin to seem insufficient. Perhaps we might consider Sebald’s “I”- figure as a personification of the “implied author”, the category Wayne Booth suggested was akin to “the author’s ‘second self’” (71). But as Rimmon-Kenan points out in her analysis of these terms, the implied author is, in contradistinction to the narrator, a voiceless entity created by the reader’s interaction with the text, who, therefore, “cannot literally be a participant in the narrative communication situation” (88). It seems that new categories might have to be invented. Nicola King calls the Sebaldian narrator a “neutral mouthpiece, not intruding with his own response or experience” (“Structures” 274). This idea might encourage a simplistic psychoanalytic reading in which the narrator is held to act as a “therapist” distanced from his “patients” (characters) by a posture of professional neutrality. Another analogy suggested by the idea of neutrality is that the narrator is akin to a kind of journalist or archivist whose work involves collecting the testimony of others. Both Mark Anderson and Lilian Furst argue that Sebald’s texts, in particular The Emigrants and Austerlitz, depend on “reported speech” 124

(Anderson 106, Furst 87). For Anderson, the narrator presents others’ lives “not as they ‘really happened’ but as they were ‘really reported’ to him” (107). The question remains, however, how far this supposedly neutral and objective listener intervenes and manipulates the material “reported” to him. On the one hand, it is notable how during long periods of narration by other characters, the narrator seems to melt away. For Ana- Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau: “The narrator disappears as mediator between the character and reader” (149). Yet the repeated grammatical reminders (“said Austerlitz”, “said Ferber”), mitigate against this absence; as Furst points out, Sebald’s discourse is in fact “cited speech, which never allows us to forget the mediating presence of the narrator” (87). This apparent contradiction between presence and absence is at the heart of Sebald’s project. As the analysis below will show, it corresponds to the simultaneous movements of proximity and distance found in both the content and structure of his prose narratives.

The ambiguous stance taken by the Sebaldian narrator is not without its socio-political implications. As Philip Schlesinger has noted, the apparent posture of bearing witness adopted in Austerlitz should not be taken at face value, knowing what we do of Sebald’s biography. Schlesinger reminds us that “behind the narrator is a German writer-in-exile who chooses to bear witness to Jewish suffering” (50). While Sebald is not quite an exile – more an emigrant, as we will see – and bears witness to non-Jewish suffering too, his nationality is undeniably important. Indeed, Helmut Schmitz even sees the narrator as a member of the “perpetrator collective” (310). Yet such analyses conflate the author with the narrator, which, though understandable given the close relation between the two, is nevertheless to make a crucial misunderstanding. I would like to suggest that the way to avoid this problem is to consider Sebald’s “I”-narrator neither as the mouthpiece of the author, nor as a reporter, therapist, observer or witness, but instead in terms of a persona. Originally the mask worn by actors in Classical Greece, persona has come to mean a part that is played, whether in writing or ordinary life. Its designation of “an assumed character or role, esp. one adopted by an author in his or her writing” (OED) dates back to the 1732 preface to Paradise Lost, and has since gained wide currency in both poetry and prose. The second, related definition, “the aspect of a person’s character that is displayed to or perceived by others” (OED), only emerged in the twentieth century, and it was this connotation that Jung adopted as a contrast to the inner being or anima. This idea of the aspect of oneself that one chooses to show, while 125 keeping other characteristics hidden, may be useful in Sebald’s case. Rather than “appearing” in his books as himself, he is perhaps appearing as someone else with the same name. (Although he is never named in the texts, the reproduction of the narrator’s passport on page 114 of Vertigo clearly shows the name “W Sebald”.)

Many other writers have appeared in their own fictions. John Fowles, for example, describes his unlikely appearance on a Victorian train, sitting opposite his character Charles Smithson towards the end of The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), in order to dramatize the author’s indecision as to whether Charles deserves a happy ending. Another instance would be the way “Martin Amis” intervenes in Money (1984), writing a screenplay for and playing chess with his protagonist (in a posture Richard Todd terms the “intrusive author”). But these are clearly playing a different role to the Sebaldian narrator, not least in the fact that they are essentially walk-on parts. Another possible comparison is with travel writers. Indeed, Bianca Theisen, in an article from 2004, argues that Sebald’s work should be considered primarily in terms of this genre. Certainly, a comparison with certain types of travel writing might be productive. For example, the narrators of such works as George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines (1987) are, arguably, semi- fictionalized versions of their authors, personae whose actions cannot be said always to correspond with the real-life experiences on which the narratives are based. Yet to invoke Genette’s categories once again, these examples correspond to the “ideological” or didactic function, in their emphasis on raising awareness, here of Parisian kitchens and Australian outback culture. Sebald’s narrative persona is closer to Genette’s “testimonial” function, which “may take the form simply of an attestation, as when a narrator indicates the source of his information, or the degree of precision of his own memories, or the feelings which one or another episode awakens in him” (Genette 256). The Sebaldian persona does all of these things while notably avoiding didacticism. Genette’s definition also distances Sebald from the “Philip Roth” who appears in such fictions as Operation Shylock (1993) and The Plot Against America (2004), or the “Bret Easton Ellis” who appears in Lunar Park (2005). Certainly, Roth’s and Ellis’s alter- egos are, like Sebald’s, composed of an ambiguous mixture of fiction and true biography. Yet in these works the focus is on the author’s psycho-dramas (in Genette’s terms, autodiegetic), whereas in Sebald we find a much greater interest in the stories of others. 126

None of these points of comparison, then, seems adequate. Indeed, the impetus for the Sebaldian persona comes partly from the author’s disdain for other forms of narrative. He told one interviewer: “There’s still fiction with an anonymous narrator who knows everything, which seems to me preposterous” (Jaggi 6). Instead, Sebald, an expert on Austrian literature, created a structure influenced by the work of Thomas Bernhard. For Sebald, Bernhard “only tells you in his books what he has heard from others. So he invented, as it were, a kind of periscopic form of narrative. You’re always sure that what he tells you is related, at one remove, at two removes, at two or three” (Silberblatt 83). Thus, Sebald says, “I content myself with the role of the messenger” (Jaggi 6). However, this is somewhat disingenuous. As shown in the analysis above, Sebald’s narrator comes with an (admittedly shadowy) personality and biography of his own, which the reader cannot help but relate to the author to a varying extent dependent on his or her knowledge of Sebald’s own history. Indeed, Jaggi, quoting a friend of Sebald, suggests that this reveals an element of playfulness on the part of the author: “He [the narrator] has obvious affinities with Max, but it’s playing on our naivety, because the reader is always tempted to identify the narrator with the writer. He’s taunting us” (Jaggi 6).

Sebald himself has stated that his use of an ambiguous narrator, along with his mixture of fact and fiction and insertion of photographs of variable quality and doubtful provenance, are all intended precisely to create uncertainty in the reader:

It’s the opposite of suspending disbelief and being swept along by the action, which is perhaps not the highest form of mental activity; it’s to constantly ask, ‘What happened to these people, what might they have felt like?’ You can generate a similar state of mind in the reader by making them uncertain. (Jaggi 6)

This uncertainty or unsettlement means that the reader can never adopt a stance either of identification with the narrator and his subjects nor of objective, privileged insight into their lives. Instead, as Deane Blackler observes, the method serves to encourage a “disobedient” and “adventurous” reader. For Blackler, Sebald’s narrators “foreground the reader’s dialogical self [. . .]. Because the narrator’s first-person voice is a self- 127 constructed fiction, the reader is free to play in the textual spaces he “creates”, free to disobey the seeming authority of a voice writing artifice” (100).

My contention is that beyond these elements of on the one hand “taunting” the reader, and on the other encouraging his or her participation (disobedient or otherwise), the result of Sebald’s narrative technique is what I call an “empathic narrative persona”. Empathy in LaCaprian terms is a simultaneous combination of proximity and distance, an acknowledgement of one’s feelings for the suffering other while retaining awareness of the other’s alterity, a mixture of identification and understanding in the same gesture. Sebald’s testimonial posture of messenger privileges an empathic relation to his subjects, in that it includes, whilst simultaneously disavowing, the “feelings which one or another episode awakens in him” (Genette 256). But beyond this, the use of the persona also enables empathy at the structural level. The narrative itself may be seen as empathic in that by inserting a persona between the author and the subject Sebald achieves a critical level of distance while nevertheless engaging “in person” with his characters. The examples below will illustrate this dual empathy which occurs at the level of both content and form.

“Paul Bereyter”, the second of four narratives that make up The Emigrants, tells the story of the narrator’s erstwhile schoolteacher in post-war Germany. Unlike the others in this volume, this biographical sketch and its photographs are, according to the author, “completely authentic” (Bigsby, “In Conversation” 155), with the exception of certain minor elements of colour imported from Wittgenstein’s biography. Thus both historical truth and personal memory are at stake. The story opens with the narrator learning of Paul’s suicide on a train-track in 1984, through an article in the local paper which fails to account for the contradictions of the teacher’s life. The narrator decides to embark on “investigations” (28) of his own. Initially, we learn, fond memories of Paul and thoughts of his sad end led him towards a series of introspective conjectures:

And so, belatedly, I tried to get closer to him, to imagine what his life was like [. . .]. I imagined him lying in the open air on his balcony where he would often sleep in the summer, his face canopied by the hosts of the stars. I imagined him skating in winter, alone on the fish ponds at Moosbach; and I imagined him stretched out on the track. (29) 128

The narrator goes on to relate how he “pictured” Paul lying down on the track to await the approaching train, before concluding:

Such endeavours to imagine his life and death did not, as I had to admit, bring me any closer to Paul, except at best for brief emotional moments of the kind that seemed presumptuous to me. It is in order to avoid this sort of wrongful trespass that I have written down what I know of Paul Bereyter. (29)

Since the rest of the story is an apparently dispassionate account of Paul’s life, drawing on the recollections of those who knew him and on documentary evidence, it is tempting to take the narrator at his word and assume that “imagining” has been rejected in favour of a respectful, distanced objectivity. Indeed, the critic J. J. Long appears to accept this in his initial remarks on this passage. Long interprets the narrator’s early attempts to “imagine” and “picture” as a reflection “on the epistemological and ethical inadequacy of empathy”, and says of the “wrongful trespass” comment above that “[e]mpathy is thus rejected as a form of unacceptable transgression” (“Intercultural Identities” 524). I will return to Long’s arguments later, but for now these (de- contextualized) comments are useful in understanding how Sebald’s narrative is, on the contrary, “empathic” in the particular sense used in this study. Long’s analysis appears to presume two things: firstly, that imagining and empathy are identical; secondly, that the rest of the “Paul Bereyter” section contains no further element of either. Both these apparent presumptions are soon problematized with detailed analysis, which will show that Sebald’s gesture in this passage is in fact precisely one of empathy in the LaCaprian sense of simultaneous proximity and distance.

I will begin with a closer look at the Sebaldian narrator’s statement that he wishes to avoid “wrongful trespass”. Despite this passage’s apparent aim of distancing the subject from the narrator, it nevertheless contains within it the seeds of personal involvement and proximity. By the narrator’s own admission, his attempts at “imagining” are rejected, in part, because they did not “bring [him] any closer to Paul”, suggesting that this is still his wish, should there be a way to do so that avoids “wrongful trespass”. Indeed, no other motive for writing the story is given. There is also an intriguing ambiguity contained within the apparently ingenuous statement that the narrator has “written down what [he] know[s] of Paul Bereyter”. As Mark McCulloh has pointed out, an adjacent phrase from the original German text, “im 129

Verlauf meiner Erkundungen”, which McCulloh translates as “in the course of my enquiries”, has been left out of the English translation of this passage. McCulloh argues that this has the effect of “de-emphasizing the narrator’s active role in the construction or reconstruction of Paul Bereyter’s last years”. McCulloh continues: “The brevity of the English discards or at least sublimates the notion of search and discovery from the narrator’s attitude towards his account” (“Introduction” 16). These ideas of search and discovery implied by “enquiries” suggest a much more active personal involvement on the narrator’s part than “written down what I know”. However, Sebald’s choice of word, “Erkundungen” has a meaning closer to “reconnaissance” than to “enquiries” (usually “Erkundigungen”). Reconnaissance, with its implications of militarism or scientific non-engagement, would seem to distance the narrator from his subject rather than bring him closer. Yet this choice of word works as a counterweight to what Michael Hulse’s translation renders as merely “brief emotional moments” but which the original German – “Ausuferungen des Gefühls” (45) – implies are excessive and overwhelming (Ausufern – “to burst or break its banks” [Collins Dictionary]). As Sebald’s German original expresses the whole passage in one sentence (where Hulse uses two), the use of the term “Erkundigungen” may be seen as a stylistic repression of the overflowing emotionality of “Ausuferungen” in a perfectly balanced linguistic gesture of LaCaprian empathy.

This blend of personal connection and consciously imposed distance may also be found in the wider trajectory of the narrative. The first movement the narrator makes is towards proximity. Immediately after the passage above, he introduces his own story and shows how it intersects with Paul’s: “In December 1952 my family moved from the village of W to the small town of S., 19 kilometres away” (29). “S.” turns out to be where Paul lives and teaches, and the narrator gives a vivid account of what it was like to be in that gifted educator’s class. He also subtly portrays the emotional feelings that arise when remembering those childhood days. Describing Paul’s habit of expertly whistling while leading the schoolchildren on mountain walks, the narrator comments that these once mysterious melodies “infallibly gave a wrench to my heart whenever, years later, I rediscovered them in a Bellini opera or Brahms sonata” (41). Even more revealingly, the narrator implicitly claims affinity with Paul through common “exile” or “emigrant” status. Paul was exiled to France before the war on account of his three- quarter Aryan status, and then endured a kind of internal exile fighting in the German 130 army before returning to S. after the war to live once again among those who had previously shunned him. The result of these vicissitudes is seen in Paul’s journals that he wrote in later life. Lucy Landau, Paul’s bereaved partner, passes on this diary, in which Paul had transcribed accounts of suicide by other writers, prefiguring his own eventual death. Lucy comments that “it seemed to me [. . .] as if Paul had been gathering evidence, the mounting weight of which, as his investigations proceeded, finally convinced him that he belonged to the exiles and not to the people of S.” (58-9). There is a clear parallel here with the narrator’s project of “gathering evidence” about Paul (in the course of his enquiries, investigations, or reconnaissance), a parallel that implies that he, too, feels that he “belong[s] to the exiles”. Indeed, the reader already knows from the previous section of The Emigrants, “Henry Selwyn”, that the narrator has lived at least some of his life in England, far from his Bavarian origins. Moreover, the later sections, “Ambros Adelwarth” and “Max Ferber”, further strengthen the narrator’s identification with the exiles whose stories he recovers and recounts, not least through his strong criticism of Germany’s attitude towards its past that parallels the disgust Paul feels for the bystanders of his home community. In this context, the Sebaldian narrator’s comment that his short 19-kilometre journey from W to S. as a young boy “seemed like a voyage halfway round the world” (29-30) is representative not just of limited childish perception and emotional upheaval, but of a sensibility which sees exile and emigration as central to the melancholic existence of both himself and the group represented by Selwyn, Bereyter, Adelwarth and Ferber. In this way the narrator appears to identify himself with his subjects to the extent that he becomes the fifth emigrant (a point also made by Susanne Finke in her article “W. G. Sebald – Der Fünfte Ausgewanderte”).

This strong personal connection, suggested by fond memories and shared emigrant status, may suggest an unproblematized identification between the narrator and Paul that contradicts his avowed determination to avoid “wrongful trespass”. However, other elements of the story show that the relationship between narrator and subject is characterized primarily by several layers of distance, at both the textual and meta- textual level. Exemplary of this technique is the way Paul’s childhood memories are rendered through several filters of memory. Paul’s father, “a man of refinement and inclined to melancholy” (50), ran an “emporium” in the town of S. selling everything “from coffee to collar studs, camisoles to cuckoo clocks, candied sugar to collapsible 131 top hats” (51). Paul remembers how he travelled by tricycle around the shop in constant wonderment, passing “through the ravines between tables, boxes and counters, amidst a variety of smells” (51). Sebald relates these events through several layers of narration. Paul remembers his childhood during convalescence from an eye operation, and describes it to Lucy; Lucy remembers this conversation decades later, and tells it to the narrator; the narrator, finally, relates Lucy’s account to us. Here multiple seams of narration and time are interposed between the narrator and the subject (Paul’s childhood), perhaps a common enough narrative technique. But this layering is characteristic of the whole structure of Sebald’s art. If the subject of this story is seen not just as an individual, “Paul Bereyter”, but also as the mid-twentieth century Europe Bereyter’s story inhabits, we can begin to model the relationship between Sebald and the victims of turbulent history. Sebald, through an act of writing, creates a narrative persona who, through acts of listening and of imagination, relates to, and relates the story of, “Paul Bereyter”. Thus the story is told at one remove. Paul, meanwhile, though clearly shown as suffering at the hands of anti-Jewish laws, which prevent his marriage to the non-Aryan Helen Hollaender and force his exile to France, is nevertheless a somewhat indirect victim compared to those who were imprisoned and murdered in concentration camps during the same period. By choosing to avoid direct confrontation with the more obvious horrors of the Holocaust, Sebald adds another layer of distance. Finally, the distance in time between the narrator and his wider subject is foregrounded in the text through the thematization of memory throughout. Distance, then, is embedded in the very structure of “Paul Bereyter”, as in much of Sebald’s oeuvre, in which subjects are separated from the author by several narrative layers. This serves as an exact counterbalance to the apparent identification implied by his statements of close personal connection. Sebald’s technique, based around a particular use of a narrative persona, thus combines simultaneously the elements of proximity and distance necessary for an empathic approach to the victims of history.

A further aspect of this empathic persona is the way he listens to the individuals whose lives he narrates. In “Paul Bereyter”, the only person with whom the narrator has a direct conversation is Lucy Landau. Their exchanges, however, are not represented as conventional question-and-answer dialogue: 132

She lived at Yverdon, and it was there, on a summer’s day in the second year after Paul died, a day I recall as curiously soundless, that I paid her the first of several visits. She began by telling me that at the age of seven, together with her father, who was an art historian and a widower, she had left her home town of Frankfurt. (42)

Lucy, then, appears spontaneously to recount her story for the narrator; any questions he may have asked are removed from the text. Moreover, the narrator implies that he holds back from asking questions at all where possible. After Lucy recounts her early years, and notes that Paul was the only person she ever met to compare with her childhood friend Ernest, there is a paragraph break. Then: “A lengthy silence followed this disclosure before Mme Landau added that she had been reading Nabokov’s autobiography on a park bench” (43). During this “lengthy silence” there is no word of sympathy or follow-up question. As Sebald told an interviewer: “I try to let people talk for themselves” (Jaggi 6).

This resistance to the temptation to prompt may be compared with Lawrence Langer’s exhortation that listeners to traumatic narratives must avoid asking leading questions which merely reflect the interlocutor’s desire for uplift and redemption and deny the truth of the speaker’s experience. In Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (1991), a meditation on the lessons to be learned from watching video interviews with survivors, Langer notes that the questioners/listeners who are apparently facilitating the testimony often fail to really “hear” the real story being told. They tend instead to urge the former victim to acknowledge that they have somehow won through, that their spirit has survived, and that their experience was not, after all, in vain:

Through the content of their questions, interviewers invite witnesses to give detailed accounts of their feelings of joy when they realized that their ordeal was over. We need to understand more about how this psychology of expectation can impose itself on the reality of the situation and gradually forge a myth that would displace the truth. (157)

This truth, for Langer, is one of an irrevocably “diminished self” whose experience is not a teleological movement from suffering to liberation to recovery but a “parallel” ontology in which the past life of the camps is ever-present. For Langer, “the cherished voices of continuity, adaptation, and renewal speak with the authority of their absence, immersing us in a world whose inhabitants remain adrift even as they clamber ashore” 133

(37). “The challenge is to enter this world to reverse the process of defamiliarization that overwhelmed the victims and to find an orientation that will do justice to their recaptured experience without summoning it or them to judgment and evaluation” (183). We need to “enter the realm of unreconciled understanding, where events remain permanently unredeemed and unredeemable” (200).

An interviewer’s questioning of a Holocaust survivor and a friend’s gentle approach to a bereaved woman may seem at first sight to have little in common. But there is in Sebald’s approach to his subjects a certain affinity with Langer’s position. Paul Bereyter commits suicide decades after the worst events of his life, suggesting that he was never able to move on from them (and calling to mind other belated suicides like Jean Améry, Paul Celan, and Primo Levi). Sebald, like Langer, implies that healing and redemption are not relevant concepts for those who lived through World War II in Europe. Paul inhabits the same realm as Langer’s “former victims” in that he carries his experience with him as ever-present (as a “parallel” self), and he gleans nothing positive, heroic or redemptive from his survival, instead succumbing to bouts of depression that culminate in bleak suicide on a railway track. Indeed, Paul may be described as a Langerian “diminished self”. Remembering the odd way Paul talked in the classroom, the narrator describes his former teacher as follows:

In well-structured sentences, he spoke without any touch of dialect but with a slight impediment of speech or timbre, as if the sound were coming not from the larynx but from somewhere near the heart. This sometimes gave one the feeling that it was all being powered by clockwork inside him and Paul in his entirety was a mechanical human made of tin and other metal parts, and might be put out of operation for ever by the smallest functional hitch. (34-5)

Paul, then, is permanently damaged by his experience. Sebald’s narrator’s avoidance of leading questions when talking to Paul’s bereaved partner is just one element of an exemplary absence of, in Langer’s terms, inappropriate “judgement” or “evaluation”. The “investigations” instigated by the narrator do not produce any results or conclusions as such. At the end of the story an opportunity to comment on Paul’s decision to commit suicide is evaded. The narrative ends with Lucy’s dispassionate account, with no further intervention from the narrator. His determination to avoid “wrongful trespass” is successfully achieved by allowing Paul’s and Lucy’s stories to speak for themselves, despite having known Paul personally, which could have led to speculation 134 or even conclusions as to Paul’s inner thoughts. For Sebald, these are forever unknown to us. As Lucy Landau tells the narrator, “in the end it is hard to know what it is that someone dies of. Yes, it is very hard, said Mme Landau, one really doesn’t know” (61- 2).

It therefore seems strange that the critic Marianna Torgovnick should detect in Sebald’s work “a pervasive identification with the dead” (126), calling him “the master of lability, of intimate identification with the fate of others” (129). Though it is tempting to reject this claim in the light of the analysis above, which shows that Sebald’s method consists not of simple identification but an empathic approach that includes it, Torgovnick’s phrase may be useful if the notion of “lability” is separated from “intimate identification”. While Sebald is not merely identifying with the dead, there are nevertheless moments of slippage that deserve attention. The extent to which the other can ever really be understood is problematized by “labile” sections which occur precisely where comprehension breaks down.

In the middle of “Paul Bereyter”, the narrator briefly discusses Paul’s time spent serving in the German army, which is the period he was “least able to understand in Paul’s story” (55). Listing Paul’s various stations in Europe, the narrator evasively comments that “doubtless [he] saw more than any heart or eye can bear” (56). Thus far the possibility of understanding is wholly rejected by maintaining strict distance. However, the conclusion of this passage represents a brief fracture, a moment of lability in which the narrator’s voice mingles with that of Paul. A photograph of Bereyter in sunglasses appears alongside the following text:

[. . .] always, as Paul wrote under this photograph, one was, as the crow flies, about 2,000 km away – but from where? – and day by day, hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one’s qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract. (56)

Here the voice of the narrator is conflated with that of Paul. Working against the determining phrase “as Paul wrote” are the lack of speech marks, the use of the formal pronoun “one” (which seems to universalize the experience), and the sudden emotional impact of “but from where?” (here a voice breaks in: the narrator’s? Paul’s?) The moment of slippage, though brief, is enough to destabilize the surrounding narration 135 which consists of the narrator’s report of his conversation with Lucy Landau. Both Paul and the narrator, it seems, have become “less comprehensible to [themselves]”. Such subtle moments of lability in the context of otherwise stable objectivity do not contradict but rather reinforce the process of empathy that operates in the area between distance and proximity, understanding and identification.

Identity slippage is a recurring theme in Sebald’s narratives, happening in relation to the living as well as the dead. In Rings of Saturn, the narrator recounts a “strange feeling” (183), a combination of identification and déjà vu, experienced during a visit to his friend Michael Hamburger. Hamburger, like Sebald’s narrator, was a German émigré writer living in East Anglia, though he moved to England much earlier, in 1933, at the age of nine. Once again, Sebald’s narrator is perhaps “gathering evidence” about the “exiles” with whom he feels an affinity. Hamburger’s shadowy memories of childhood in Berlin are recounted by the narrator in paraphrase from Hamburger’s published memoirs. Then we learn of Hamburger’s current thoughts about the meaning of his life, recounted to the narrator in the garden, in which Hamburger ponders his links to one of the German writers he has translated, the lyric poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843). Their birthdates, for example, are just two days apart, and the water pump in Hamburger’s garden has the same year written on it as that of Hölderlin’s birth. These links amount not just to coincidences but also Hamburger’s sense that his personality has taken on aspects of the earlier writer. Hamburger wonders: “Across what distances in time do the elective affinities and correspondences connect? How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being, or, if not oneself, one’s precursor?” (182) Hamburger’s existential conundrum is itself a precursor of the narrator’s odd experience that follows, and indeed it is not clear (partly due to Sebald’s avoidance of speech marks) whether Hamburger, the narrator, or both, are articulating these questions. The narrator says that

why it was that on my first visit to Michael’s house I instantly felt as if I lived or had once lived there, in every respect precisely as he does, I cannot explain. All I know is that I stood spellbound in his high-ceilinged studio room with its north-facing windows in front of the heavy mahogany bureau at which Michael said he no longer worked because the room was so cold, even in midsummer; and that, while we talked of the difficulty of heating old houses, a strange feeling came upon me, as if it were not he who had abandoned that place of work but I, as if the spectacles cases, letters and writing materials that had 136

evidently lain untouched for months in the soft north light had once been my spectacles cases, my letters and my writing materials. (183)

Continuing through the house, noting his feelings affinity of with other objects scattered around, the narrator has the same feeling of being one’s own precursor that Hamburger had reported: “the quite outlandish thought crossed my mind that these things, the kindling, the jiffy bags, the fruit preserves, the seashells and the sound of the sea within them had all outlasted me, and that Michael was taking me round a house in which I myself had lived a long time ago” (184-5).

There are different ways in which to interpret this ambiguous experience. It could be described as normal déjà vu enriched by a sense of connection to others that collapses time. It could also be seen as a way of identifying with one’s antecedents or even a kind of reincarnation, thereby claiming a connection to the past. More problematically, Hamburger could be seen to over-identify with Hölderlin, and the narrator with Hamburger, in gestures of appropriation of the other’s life and memory. However, despite this suggestion, this episode does not undermine Sebald’s ethics of representation, nor does it disrupt the empathic balance between “enquiries” and “brief emotional moments” held so carefully in “Paul Bereyter”. Hamburger is still living, is known well to the narrator, and did not suffer directly under the Nazi regime, all things which separate him from Bereyter. Sebald suggests that moments of identification with those such as Hamburger are not subject to the same intense scruples as with victims of the Holocaust.

This distinction is made clearer in Sebald’s final prose narrative, Austerlitz. An early episode from this book reinforces the carefully delineated ethical stance which rejects the possibility of imagining others’ suffering. The narrator describes his visit, in 1967, to the historic fortress of Breendonk in Belgium, which was used by the German occupying forces during World War II as an internment camp. Initially it appears to him as “a low-built concrete mass, rounded at all its outer edges and giving the gruesome impression of something hunched and misshapen” (25). Walking through the grounds, he passes through an area where, he tells us, prisoners were forced to move overwhelmingly large quantities of earth using crude wheelbarrows. While he initially 137 seems to be feeling sympathy for their plight, close analysis of his response reveals something more complicated:

I could not imagine how the prisoners, very few of whom had probably ever done hard physical labour before their arrest and internment, could have pushed these barrows full of heavy detritus over the sun-baked clay of the ground, furrowed by ruts as hard as stone, or through the mire that was churned up after a single day’s rain; it was impossible to picture them bracing themselves against the weight until their hearts nearly burst, or think of the overseer beating them about the head with the handle of a shovel when they could not move forward. (28-9)

An odd contradiction is in evidence here. The reader’s sympathy is apparently elicited: the ground is “hard as stone”; the prisoners’ “hearts nearly burst” with effort; they are even “beat[en] about the head”. Yet simultaneously the narrator insists on his distance from the victims: he “could not imagine” their labour, which is, moreover, “impossible to picture” or even “think of”. Thus while the scene is “pictured” for the reader in prose, the narrator paradoxically asserts his determination not to imagine it and thereby risk identification with the prisoners. Thus far, the process is similar to the narrator of “Paul Bereyter”s rejection of attempts to imagine the life and death of his former teacher. But this time the ethical point is extended to show that it is the fact that the victims are unknown and unknowable that makes identification with them impermissible. The next section of the narrative makes this clear:

However, if I could not envisage the drudgery performed day after day, year after year, at Breendonk and all the other main and branch camps, when I finally entered the fort itself and glanced through the glass panes of a door on the right into the so-called mess of the SS guards with its scrubbed tables and benches, its bulging stove and the various adages neatly painted on its wall in Gothic lettering, I could well imagine the sight of the good fathers and dutiful sons from Vilsbiburg and Fuhlsbüttel, from the Black Forest and the Bavarian Alps, sitting here when they came off duty to play cards or write letters to their loved ones at home. After all, I had lived among them until my twentieth year. (29, emphasis mine)

In making this distinction between unknown victims, of whom he has no direct experience, and the Germans running the camp, a cultural group he knows from childhood, the narrator sets out an ethics of representation in which what is beyond one’s own experience is not to be explicitly imagined. While the description of the working prisoners contains some emotive and descriptive material, it stops short of the 138 common fictional trope of trying imaginatively to enter the mind of an individual victim, and, moreover, explicitly asserts that this strategy would be wrong.

Instead Sebald’s narrator takes what may be called an allusive stance in this passage, with reference to the historian Saul Friedländer’s attempt to define what might constitute “adequacy” in writing about the Holocaust. After citing Ida Fink’s short stories and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah as positive instances, Friedländer offers some suggestions:

A common denominator appears: the exclusion of straight, documentary realism, but the use of some sort of allusive or distanced realism. Reality is there, in its starkness, but perceived through a filter: that of memory (distance in time), that of spatial displacement, that of some sort of narrative margin which leaves the unsayable unsaid. (“Introduction” 17)

One way that Sebald’s “allusive realism” establishes a “narrative margin” is through the description of objects. As he wanders through the interior of Breendonk, the narrator obliquely addresses the issue of vanished, unrecorded memories:

I think of how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on. Histories, for instance, like those of the straw mattresses which lay, shadow-like, on the stacked plank beds and which had become thinner and shorter because the chaff in them disintegrated over the years, shrunken – and now, in writing this, I do remember that such an idea occurred to me at the time – as if they were the mortal frames of those who once lay there in the darkness. (31)

The “filter” of memory, to use Friedländer’s terms, here enables the act of “allusive realism”. Where a reader might expect an emotional reaction to the evidence of human suffering and misery in this dungeon-like place, the narrator instead reaches for philosophical abstraction, pondering on the possibility of inanimate objects owning “memory”, while only fleetingly mentioning the “mortal frames” of the unknown victims. Once again this strategy maintains a decorous distance that “leaves the unsayable unsaid” by only alluding to the lost memories of victims rather than trying to imagine what these memories might have been. 139

This allusive strategy may also be described as a repetitive process of approaching the subject and turning away. On entering a casemate with an iron hook hanging from the ceiling, suggestive of torture, the narrator reports feeling unwell. However, he insists that this is not due to imagining what might have happened there: “It was not that as the nausea rose in me I guessed at the kind of third-degree interrogations which were being conducted here around the time I was born” (33). Instead the narrator turns away from speculation in favour of written accounts by actual survivors. First he describes the torture suffered by Jean Améry at this same fortress. Améry described this in At the Mind’s Limits (1966), and Sebald paraphrases his account, noting how he “was hoisted aloft by his hands, tied behind his back, so that with a crack and splintering sound [. . .] his arms dislocated from the sockets in his shoulder joints, and he was left dangling” (34). Rather than try to further describe Améry’s suffering, the narrator turns away again to describe the fate of another survivor. Here Sebald’s habit of associative thought begins to take on a threatening quality, as every attempt to shy away from horror simply leads back to more. The narrator gives a dispassionate, factual account, abstracted from Claude Simon’s Le Jardin des Plantes (1997), of how one Gostone Novelli immigrated to South America after suffering the same mode of torture as Améry. In the new continent, Novelli analysed the language of a primitive tribe, which consisted “almost entirely of vowels, particularly the sound A in countless variations of tone and emphasis” (35). On returning home and becoming an artist, Novelli used clusters of this letter A in his paintings, which to the narrator resemble “a long-drawn- out scream”, illustrated in the text as follows:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAA (36)

Thus Sebald finds a way of indirectly addressing the suffering of Holocaust victims without actually describing it. Through an account of a visit to one of the more peripheral sites of Holocaust history, Sebald shows his empathic narrative persona wrestling with the impossibility of imagining others’ suffering and pondering the meaning of the traces that remain, whether they be straw mattresses or survivor accounts. However, no facile closure, conclusions, or judgement are offered; the 140

Breendonk episode ends abruptly with the drawn-out scream, and the narrative moves directly on to the narrator’s second encounter with Austerlitz.

The relationship between the Sebaldian persona and Jacques Austerlitz, Kindertransport survivor and architectural historian, offers further evidence of the empathic nature of this text. LaCapra describes empathy as “an affective relation, rapport, or bond with the other recognized and respected as other” (Writing 212-3). The central relationship in Austerlitz dramatizes this empathic bond in exemplary fashion; the narrator befriends and supports but maintains a respectful distance, never questioning, intruding or speculating. Instead, what the narrator does, over the decades of chance and arranged meetings with the troubled protagonist, is listen. At each encounter, the narrator briefly describes how he came to be with Austerlitz, before allowing the latter’s story to take over, punctuated by the phrase “said Austerlitz” only where grammatically necessary. Austerlitz, who was removed from his motherland and mother tongue as an infant, who grew up with disturbed foster-parents, and who only late in life is beginning to investigate his origins and the part played by Nazism in his family history, may be seen as a traumatized “survivor” who bears witness through testimony. In this light, the narrator could be construed as what Dori Laub calls an “empathic listener” (68). In his chapter “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening” (1992), Laub presents himself as at once Holocaust survivor, psychoanalyst specializing in trauma, and co-founder of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, for which he also acts as an interviewer. Regarding this latter role, he argues that not only is his presence essential for the enablement of testimony, but that it can also enact a measure of healing in the traumatized survivor. This is clear from his conflation of his two roles of psychoanalyst and listener. Discussing the first, he says that “a therapeutic process – a process of constructing a narrative, of reconstructing a history and essentially or re-externalizating the event – has to be set in motion” (69). Moving on to the second, the testimonial process, he explicitly links it with the therapeutic situation: “I find the process that is set in motion by psychoanalytic practice and by the testimony to be essentially the same, both in the narrator and in myself as listener (analyst or interviewer)” (70). Thus, by implication, “empathic listening” to the testimony of Holocaust survivors can “set in motion” the same therapeutic process aspired to in relation to psychiatric patients. Moreover, in this model, healing is enabled in an extremely passive manner; the listener merely has to listen, to be the site of “re- 141 externalization” to which the survivor can “articulate and transmit the story” (69). The empathic listener is an “addressable other, an other who can hear the anguish of one’s memories and thus affirm and recognize their realness” (68, all emphases in original). Laub’s use of the pronoun “one” is revealing here. As a survivor himself, it is perhaps he who is seeking “healing” through this process along with his patients. Yet his interviewees do not necessarily want to be healed as such. As Langer argues, the survivors interviewed for the Fortunoff Archive are not equivalent to those seeking psychiatric help; they do not demand to be healed, simply heard. Laub’s use of “empathy” here is non-LaCaprian as it fails to allow the other to retain his or her otherness; transference and healing are intrinsic components of his schema. As such it differs from Sebald’s listening narrator in Austerlitz who offers no explicit discourse of healing, merely recording the story of his protagonist.

And yet there are quasi-therapeutic elements to Austerlitz at the level of narrative structure which may be revealed through further analysis of LaCaprian empathy. LaCapra seeks to activate the term in order to achieve more useful or productive ways of representing the traumatic past. He argues that Holocaust writing, for example, can draw on empathy to create “a discursive analogue of mourning as a mode of working through a relation to historical losses” (Writing 213). LaCapra labels this mode “empathic unsettlement”, in which the position of the writer is self-reflexively utilized, explored and expressed. Suggesting how this might be achieved, LaCapra describes narrative in terms of movement:

Empathic unsettlement also raises in pointed form the problem of how to address traumatic events involving victimization, including the problem of composing narratives that neither confuse one’s own voice or position with the victim’s nor seek facile uplift, harmonization, or closure but allow the unsettlement that they address to affect the narrative’s own movement in terms of both acting out and working through. (Writing 78)

LaCapra is drawing on Freudian psychoanalytic terminology for his analogy. In “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through” (1914), Freud describes a certain kind of neurotic patient who “does not remember anything at all of what he has forgotten and repressed, but rather acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory, but as an action; he repeats it, without being aware that he is repeating it” (36). Therapy enables the patient to “work through” the resistance that is causing this repetition, and 142 properly to remember and accept the (often traumatic) past event. Acting out is unconscious and involuntary, while working through is a process of deliberate remembrance. Sebald’s narrator in Austerlitz moves from one state to the other. The book opens as follows: “In the second half of the 1960s I travelled repeatedly from England to Belgium, partly for study purposes, partly for other reasons which were never entirely clear to me” (1). This unconscious repetition “affect[s] the narrative’s own movement” in that it leads to the narrator’s first meeting with Austerlitz. Indeed, the narrator moves between places and events with little apparent volition, as in the wanderings around Europe described in Vertigo. However, the end of Austerlitz shows the narrator “working through” his “unsettlement” by revisiting Breendonk thirty years after his first experience. No “uplift, harmonization, or closure” is attempted here, though there is a small hint of historical progress: “The fortifications lay unchanged on the blue-green island, but the number of visitors had increased” (411). Along with this evidence of wider public interest in the past, the narrator summarizes Dan Jacobson’s family memoir, Heshel’s Kingdom (1998). By reading this book on the grassy bank near the fort the narrator is engaging in a deliberate, conscious, participatory act of remembrance. The details given from this book also serve as a countermeasure to any “uplift” created by the progress Austerlitz makes towards tracing his father’s history and reconciling himself with his lost lover, Marie de Verneuil. Jacobson’s memoir reminds the reader of the factual losses of the Holocaust, in this case those at Kaunas in Lithuania, where “more than thirty thousand people were killed” (Austerlitz 415).

Across the narrative time of Austerlitz, then, the Sebaldian persona has moved from acting-out to working-through, in a process analogous to LaCapra’s “empathic unsettlement”. Moreover, through the active visiting of memorial sites, which along with Breendonk include Terezin and a Jewish cemetery, Sebald’s narrator also fulfils the requirements of what Andreas Huyssen has called “mimetic approximation”. On the question of how present generations can mourn the Holocaust in what he labels our “museal” (11) culture, Huyssen writes:

No matter how fractured by media, geography, or subject position representations of the Holocaust are, ultimately, it all comes back to this core: unimaginable, unspeakable, and unrepresentable horror. Post-Holocaust generations, it seems to me, can only approach that core by what I would call mimetic approximation, a mnemonic strategy which recognizes the event in its 143

otherness and beyond identification or therapeutic empathy but which physically relieves some of the horror and the pain in the slow and persistent labor of remembrance. (“Monument” 16)

Sebald may be said to participate in this “physical” remembrance in a virtual fashion through his empathic narrative persona, who persistently wanders the memorial sites of Europe while avoiding over-identification with victims. Whether this “relieves some of the horror and the pain” is debatable; Huyssen’s formula is motivated by his desire for positive patterns of mourning as an “antidote to the freezing of memory” (15), and it is not clear that Sebald would accede to this aim. Nevertheless Sebald’s strategy is broadly similar to Huyssen’s exhortation that we should put the myriad representations of memory in contemporary culture to some use.

Another suggestion as to how later generations should deal with the horrors of the past is provided by the philosopher Gillian Rose. Rose criticizes the prevalence in both academic and popular culture of what she calls “Holocaust piety”. This results from the belief that the Holocaust is “ineffable” and therefore inherently unrepresentable. For Rose, this philosophical view works “to mystify something we dare not understand” (43, emphasis in original). Rose wants to expose what she sees as the painful truth of humanity’s implicit collusion with evil, which can become concealed by simplistic divisions between victims and perpetrators. This truth is to be reached through a new ethics of representation that combines “the fascism of representation” with the “representation of Fascism”. Rose analyses two films, Schindler’s List and The Remains of the Day (while also making some reference to the books on which they are based). She argues that a “crisis of identity” (46) could and should have been produced in Spielberg’s film, by bringing out the implicit parallels between the Nazi commandant Goeth and the Jews’ saviour Schindler. Instead the film fails, leaving us “at the beginning of the day” (48, emphasis in original), in the safe position of the “ultimate predator” (47) who watches sentimentally from a distance. It misses the opportunity of leaving us, instead, “unsafe, but with the remains of the day. To have that experience, we would have to discover and confront our own fascism” (48, emphasis in original).

For Rose, this experience is achieved in The Remains of the Day, which dramatises, through the character of the butler Stevens, “the contradiction of the ethic of service” (51). Stevens is motivated by a desire to serve a Lord for whom he has moral 144 admiration, yet knows that once he has made his choice, he must show unquestioning loyalty – and in this case, the Lord is a key mobilizer of British inter-war appeasement of Hitler. Rose points out that Stevens’ situation is akin to joining a fascist “corporation” such as German Nazism, which in turn has parallels with the “great house” of English aristocracy. On joining a fascist organisation, one makes an initial free choice of allegiance, but then loses freedom by renouncing the right to criticize. Rose concludes:

This film dramatises the link between emotional and political collusion. Without sentimental voyeurism, it induces a crisis of identification in the viewer, who is brought up flat against equally the representation of Fascism, the honourable tradition which could not recognise the evils of Nazism, and the corporate order of the great house, and the fascism of representation, a political culture which we identify as our own, and hence an emotional economy which we cannot project and disown. (53-4, emphasis in original)

Rose, then, describes a “crisis of identification”, in which the viewer is forced to identify with the butler’s dilemma of loyalty. In Austerlitz, a comparable moment is the identification a reader could make with the protagonist’s profound ignorance of the Holocaust. After he belatedly recovers his memory, Austerlitz explains how he had achieved this evasion:

Inconceivable as it seems to me today, I knew nothing about the conquest of Europe by the Germans and the slave state they set up, and nothing about the persecution I escaped, or at least, what I did know was not much more than a salesgirl in a shop, for instance, knows about the plague or cholera. As far as I was concerned the world ended in the late nineteenth century. [. . .] I did not read newspapers because, as I now know, I feared unwelcome revelations, I turned on the radio only at certain hours of the day, I was always refining my defensive reactions, creating a kind of quarantine or immune system which, as I maintained my existence in a smaller and smaller space, protected me from anything that could be connected in any way, however distant, with my own early history. (197-8)

Austerlitz’s discovery of his past, including his mother’s internment, transport and death, leads the reader, alongside the narrator, to a fresh appraisal of the camp at Theresiendstadt where his mother was held. The Roseian crisis of identification lies in the connection between Austerlitz’s “avoidance system” (278) and that of the reader, who is forced (through the fascism of representation) to rediscover the Holocaust (the representation of Fascism) along with the protagonist. My analysis here depends on an 145 assumption that the reader, while not being as ignorant as Austerlitz, nevertheless needs to be reminded of a subject all too easily avoided, perhaps because he or she “fear[s] unwelcome revelations”. The reader is forced to confront his or her attitudes to and knowledge of the Holocaust and to consider whether they have been adequate. Thus Sebald’s novel takes on a kind of moral purpose, a strategy of raising consciousness, of contributing to continuing remembrance by implicating the reader in society’s supposed problems of avoidance and denial.

However, this reading reduces Sebald’s achievement to the status of socio-political tract, or at least to Genette’s “ideological function” which I earlier discounted. Moving far beyond such strategies, Austerlitz reminds us that straightforward representation is no longer enough, and that forms must be adapted and even distorted in order to make the subject meaningful once more in a cultural climate that is so “fractured and sedimented” (Huyssen, “Monument” 13). For example, at the moment of the reader’s closest potential identification with Austerlitz – the search for an image of his lost mother – visual form is portrayed as being expressly manipulable and inconclusive. Austerlitz obtains a copy of a propaganda film made at the Theresiendstadt ghetto where his mother was held. This film purports to show a civilized and happy life being lived by the Jewish inhabitants. Austerlitz, in an effort to find his mother’s face, has a “slow-motion copy” made, which “reveal[s] previously hidden objects and people, creating, by default as it were, a different sort of film altogether”. This slowing-down changes the appearance of the inhabitants from being “cheerful” and “apparently in perfect contentment” to people “toiling in their sleep”, weary, and apparently “hovering rather than walking”, reminiscent to the narrator of “blurred” and “dissolved” ghostly images. Meanwhile even the sound on the slowed-down version is different, with the music changing from “merry polka” to “funeral march”, and the “high-pitched, strenuous tones” of the voice-over becoming a “menacing growl” that reminds the narrator of caged beasts “driven out of their minds in captivity” (344-50). Thus Austerlitz’s manipulation of the film reveals the truth of the situation in Theresiendstadt, which is one of imprisoned slave labourers in appalling conditions, who will soon be sent East, murdered, and “dissolved” from history. Moreover, once again Sebald’s use of fact and fiction in the same moment contributes to the effect of crisis and unsettlement. If Austerlitz’s mother is imaginary, who are the faces in the stills apparently reproduced from the propaganda film, which appear on the page of 146

Sebald’s text? Over-identification with the protagonist’s mourning for a mother he never knew is impossible in such a position of uncertainty. In Rose’s terms, we avoid “Holocaust piety” by emerging from the scene not with “sentimental tears”, but with “the dry eyes of a deep grief” (54).

Both the problematisation of representation implicit in the Theresiendstadt episode of Austerlitz, and the creation of an empathic narrative persona, point to the essential self- reflexivity of Sebald’s technique. As such, a parallel might be drawn with Linda Hutcheon’s category of “historiographic metafiction”, which is “obsessed with the question of how we can come to know the past today” (44), and in which “[n]arrative representation – fictive and historical – comes under [. . .] scrutiny” (14). For Hutcheon, this is inextricably linked to the postmodern, the moment “where documentary historical actuality meets formalist self-reflexivity and parody” (7). Though the novel form has always been both fictional and worldly, “postmodern historiographic metafiction merely foregrounds this inherent paradox by having its historical and socio-political grounding sit uneasily alongside its self-reflexivity” (14).

However, Hutcheon’s insistence on the postmodern nature of her category makes it problematic to apply to Sebald, a writer whose style and content are both steeped in the past. A more productive way to assess Sebald’s self-reflexivity is offered by Anne Fuchs in her monograph ‘Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte’. Zur Poetik der Erinnerung in W.G. Sebalds Prosa (2004). Fuchs situates Sebald in the context of theories of cultural memory. Sebald’s position, she explains, has been formed through experiencing the aftermath of the war (personal memory), hearing or noticing the absence of parental accounts of that war (community memory), and later engaging with issues of German collective memory (cultural memory). Fuchs argues that the way to deal with the conflicts inherent in these memory definitions is to be methodologically self-reflexive. J. J. Long summarizes Fuchs’ analysis as follows:

An ethical mode of historical writing, she argues, needs to reconstruct the past in a way that thematizes the ideological and affective determinants of such a reconstruction. This in turn produces certain writing effects that lead to a ‘virtual empathy’ in which the difference between self and other is made transparent. (“Book Review” 102) 147

Thus we return to the question of empathy, which as I have argued is at the heart of Sebald’s narrative persona. Fuchs is using the same nuanced version of this term articulated by LaCapra and which results from Sebald’s simultaneous gesture of proximity and distance. Other critics, however, have construed the empathic dimension of Sebald’s work differently. Mark McCulloh detects a theme of “democratized empathy” in which the suffering of all nature has equal value, because, in Sebald’s world, “everything is part of the same monism”:

Essential to this monism is the premise that everything has its rightful place and is worthy of attention, especially those things or beings that are neglected, forgotten, or nearly lost. [. . .]. Thus, according to the logic of democratized empathy, even the traumatization of a mere moth or butterfly is to be regarded as true suffering. (“Stylistics” 39-40).

Surprisingly, McCulloh does not take up the implications of this for Sebald’s portrayal of the Holocaust and its victims. Indeed, McCulloh is more interested in the natural and holistic elements of Sebald’s work. Meanwhile, Jan Ceuppens calls the Sebaldian narrator’s vow to avoid “wrongful trespass” a “Bilderverbot [pictures ban]”, a “prohibition against picturing or imagining another person all too vividly” that results in an opposition between “a cool and distanced approach [and] an empathic one” (253). But in the terms set out in the present study, empathy can contain a “cool and distanced approach”, rather than necessarily being in opposition to it. Finally, J. J. Long argues that The Emigrants is situated

between the extreme positions of an uncritical empathy on the one hand and a pseudo-objective empiricism on the other. This positioning “in-between” allows [Sebald] to offer models of intercultural and, indeed, intersubjective narrative that work against appropriation not by avoiding it [. . .] but by thematizing it in a self-reflexive manner. (“Intercultural Identities” 526)

Again, this “in-between” position is not somewhere between “uncritical empathy” and “pseudo-objective empiricism” but is LaCaprian empathy in the terms set out in the present study. Transgenerational empathy is at once identification and objectivity. This, along with the element of self-reflexivity identified by Fuchs and Long, is crucial to Sebald’s empathic narrative persona, a figure who, throughout his narratives, treads a delicate path between memory and history in a simultaneous gesture of proximity and 148 distance. The next chapter deals with a novel very different in style that nevertheless achieves similar goals. 149

Chapter 5

“An act of replacement”: duality, post-postmemory and absence in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated

In the previous chapter I considered transgenerational empathy through the example of W. G. Sebald’s narrative persona, a figure one generation removed from the Holocaust yet nevertheless connected to the events by geographical and personal ties. This chapter will explore the extent to which other narratives, whose authors, personae and characters have greater generational and spatial distance than those of Sebald, may still achieve an empathic relation to the past. My main focus is on Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (2002), which deals with the relationship between present and past through the theme of grandfathers and grandchildren. In this novel, two young men, one Jewish American, one Ukrainian, search for the truth about their grandfathers, both of whom were directly affected by the Holocaust. Such quests may be held to symbolize society’s continuing desire to unearth secrets from the traumatic past and to evaluate their effect on our lives in the present. In an essay published in 2001, the historian Saul Friedländer offers a psychoanalytic view of this process of discovery:

The ‘generation of the grandchildren’, mainly among Europeans (Germans in particular) but among Jews as well, has sufficient distance from the events in terms of both the sheer passage of time and the lack of personal involvement to be able to confront the full impact of the past. Thus, the expansion of memory of the Shoah could be interpreted as the gradual lifting, induced by the passage of time, of collective repression. (“History” 274)

However, this confrontation with the past will lead to revelations and reorientations. A “lack of personal involvement” does not mean that the impact is necessarily lessened, particularly when distant familial connections haunt present generations. Germans, Jews and others continue to confront the facts of their ancestors’ involvement and the implications for their own sense of identity. Although the effect of this may eventually decrease as the decades and centuries pass, for now the corrosive effect of past evil on present consciousness remains pervasive.

Literary narratives are beginning to emerge that address this situation by moving beyond the “second generation”, the children of survivors, to the third and even fourth 150 generations after the event. Nancy Huston’s novel Fault Lines (2007) explores the effect of the less well known Nazi policy of “Germanisation” on its victims and their descendants. In an “Author’s Note”, Huston explains how children with an “Aryan” appearance from occupied countries such as Ukraine and Poland were taken from their parents and sent to Lebensborn (Fountain of Life) centres, and from there to approved adoptive parents, to grow up as Germans and replenish a population decimated by the Nazis’ empire-building wars. Huston’s novel addresses this topic through an unusual structure, consisting of four sections, each narrated by a different six-year-old child in a different time: Sol, 2004; Randall, 1982; Sadie, 1962; and Kristina, 1944-45. Each narrator is the child of the next, meaning that Randall, Sadie and Kristina are Sol’s father, grandmother and great-grandmother respectively. The reverse order of these narratives means that the explanation for each character’s emotional difficulties is mysterious and revelatory. A version of the story told in normal chronological order would go something like this: Kristina has been taken from her Ukrainian parents and raised as an Aryan. After the war her original parents cannot be found, so she is sent to a family with Ukrainian heritage in Toronto. This has repercussions for the next three generations. Her daughter Sadie witnesses Kristina’s violent sex with another Lebensborn survivor. Sadie grows up obsessed with the Holocaust and moves with her family to Israel in order to research it, making a lasting impression on her son, Randall. Randall’s son Solomon, meanwhile, is the most obviously mentally disturbed, believing himself to have godlike powers and indulging in psychosexual fantasies relating to the current Middle Eastern conflict and Gulf War. At the beginning of the novel (and the end of the chronological story), Kristina is persuaded into a reunion with her adoptive sister from her days as a German child. The two old women fight over a doll that one had promised the other, in a climactic moment placed early in the narrative that initially appears comedic but gains tragic resonance as the deep wounds imparted by the Nazi policy are revealed. Thus the Nazi project of removing children from their families echoes down the “fault lines” of generations, not only in the emotions and imagination of descendants but also in the unreconciled hatred between “pure” Germans and their fellow Europeans.

Huston shows how identities can become irrevocably damaged by family upheaval. For example, Sadie, on discovering at age six that her mother had a German background, uses this to explain, through her inner demon, why she has been unhappy and confused: 151

“Now you know where the evil comes from, says my Fiend, you’ve been living a lie since the day you were born” (229, emphasis in original). A similar interior voice (also shown through italicization) afflicts “Micha” in Rachel Seiffert’s novel The Dark Room (2001). The German grandchild of a Waffen SS soldier, Micha obsessively researches the Holocaust while chiding himself as to his motivation: “Stupid to feel guilty about things that were done before I was born” (247); “Even when I cry about it, I’m crying for myself. Not for the people who were killed” (377). Like Sadie, he realises that important secrets have been withheld, and insists on finding them out for himself, in a quest which alienates his loved ones and strains his relationships. Micha has a habit of rehearsing to himself his family connections; “In queues, on trains, in idle moments, he will lay them out in his head; layers of time and geography” (221). He remembers his “Opa”, Askan Boell, who died when Micha was a child, as kind, attentive, and a gifted artist. However, Boell is also known to have served in the Waffen SS in Belarus before being captured by the Russians and interned for nine years after the war. Micha cannot reconcile his personal memories with the possibility that his grandfather was a perpetrator of atrocities, and travels to Belarus to look for the truth. In the area in which his grandfather served, the local museum’s photographs of Nazis massacring Jews do not show Boell’s face. However, Micha finds an old man who lived through that period, Jozef Kolesnik. Kolesnik confirms Micha’s fears, saying that he remembers the few who refused to participate in the killings, and that Boell was not one of them. Though Kolesnik’s recollections are tainted with his own dubious past, Micha, adding them to the accumulation of evidence produced by his researches, is fully convinced:

Where is my proof? I have no reason not to believe it. There are no pictures of him holding a gun to someone’s head, but I am sure that he did that, and pulled the trigger, too. The camera was pointing elsewhere, shutter opening and closing on another murder of another Jew, done by another man. But my Opa was no more than a few paces away. (370-1, emphasis in original)

Micha’s respectable German family do not share his conviction, or are fearful of confronting it. His sister tries to suggest that the discovery of Boell’s secret should not change his status as loved grandparent:

People do terrible things. It was war. I’m not excusing it. Not at all. But it was war and it was cruel and confusing and he couldn’t tell right from wrong any more, and he did something terrible. [. . .] I don’t really know, of course, but 152

maybe sometimes they believe in these things, or they become them, or maybe sometimes they don’t. They just do them and then they go on. (373-4)

Such expressions of moral ambiguity have led some critics to accuse Seiffert of revisionism. Carole Angier, for example, chides Seiffert for choosing to focus on the pain of ordinary Germans both during and after the war: “The sufferings of those who espoused an ideology of 1,000-year domination and genocide are not the same as the sufferings of innocent people, even after more than 56 years” (36-7). Such criticism, which insists that all perpetrators must be linked to the ideology served by their actions, misses Seiffert’s point about human fallibility and the contingencies impinging on personal agency. More importantly, it highlights the enduring importance of the issues at stake. In raising the question and provoking such reactions, Seiffert’s novel demonstrates the continuing power of the now relatively distant past to influence thinking in the present, symbolized by the particular dynamics of the relationship between grandparent and grandchild.

It is this relationship that forms the core of Everything is Illuminated, in which a grandfather with a terrible war secret tells his grandson: “I am not a bad person. I am a good person who has lived in a bad time” (227). This novel may only be understood in relation to the circumstances of its production. Its author, Jonathan Safran Foer, was born in 1977 and grew up in the U.S.A. When still a college student, aged nineteen, he travelled to Ukraine in search of his Jewish family history. His grandfather, Lewis Safran, had escaped from the Nazi assault in 1941 that wiped out his village and killed most of its occupants, including Safran senior’s wife and daughter. Safran met his second wife, Foer’s grandmother, in a displaced person’s camp in Poland before moving to America and continuing the family line. Foer’s interest in this history was sparked by his mother passing him a photograph of Safran with the family who helped him escape. He travelled to the region in search of any surviving members of this family, and of any remains of the village, but found no trace whatsoever. This experience led to the writing of the novel, in which Foer constructs a much more eventful version of his journey, extrapolating an unrestrained narrative of farce and fantasy from his experience. In an interview, Foer has described how he sees this process of transforming real life into fiction: “In a certain sense the book wasn’t an act of creation so much as it was an act of replacement. I encountered a hole – and it was 153 like the hole that I found was in myself, and one that I wanted to try to fill up” (Wagner 14). I interrogate the terms of this statement later in this chapter.

Everything is Illuminated is an experimental and semi-autobiographical novel that addresses themes of generational memory, family secrets, and the ethical relation of the present to the past through a combination of picaresque narrative, epistolary interludes and magical realism. Despite its complex structure, it is at base a quest, a journey that leads in all its various strands towards one dark destination: the Holocaust. The novel contains two narrative strands, one present-day, one historical. The first may be seen as a fantasy based on Foer’s real-life journey. On 2nd July 1997, exactly a year after Ukraine’s adoption of a new democratic constitution, “Jonathan Safran Foer” arrives from New York carrying a photograph of his grandfather, “Safran”. In the photo alongside Safran are the family who saved him from the Nazis, a young girl and her parents. On the back is an ambiguous inscription: “This is me with Augustine, February 21, 1943”. Jonathan surmises that “me” refers to Safran, “Augustine” to the young girl, and that there was a relationship between them. As forty-four years have passed, the parents are probably dead, but Augustine might still be alive; Jonathan’s purpose is to find and thank her, but also, as a Jewish American descendant of immigrants, to trace his European ancestral roots. To do so he must find his grandfather’s former shtetl, “Trachimbrod”.

Jonathan’s search is narrated by his Ukrainian translator and guide, “Alex Perchov”, in the form of chapters (“divisions”) sent later to Jonathan for editing and approval. Each division is accompanied by a letter which adds background and alludes to suggestions for narrative changes by Jonathan in his (unrevealed) replies. Thus the notional act of writing is divided between two fictional characters. Each chapter describes an episode in the initially farcical but increasingly sombre journey towards the discoveries (“illumination”) made by both young men. Their driver is Alex’s grandfather, who is inexplicably accompanied by a psychotic guide dog. The humour of this section is at the expense both of Jonathan, whose search is both incomprehensible and lucrative for the Ukrainians, and of Alex and his grandfather, who are comically incompetent. Nevertheless they eventually find what remains of Trachimbrod: an old woman living in isolation who has preserved, in labelled boxes, a motley collection of salvaged mementoes and bric-a-brac from the destroyed shtetl. When told they are searching for 154

Trachimbrod, she replies: “You are here. I am it” (118). She takes them to the site, now an empty field with a plaque commemorating the community’s destruction. Though not the Augustine they were looking for (her name is Lista), she nevertheless remembers sharing her youth with Jonathan’s grandfather before the war.

Here the tone of the novel changes and two Holocaust tales are related. Lista claims to have survived the Nazi assault on Trachimbrod because, pregnant, she was sadistically shot between the legs and left to crawl away; the baby took the bullet and she survived the rest of the war hiding in the nearby forest. Like fellow Holocaust survivor Rosa in Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl, Lista still believes that her lost child is alive: ‘“I must go in and care for my baby,’ she said. ‘It is missing me”’ (Foer, Everything 193). The second story is told by Alex’s grandfather, who is prompted by one of Lista’s photographs to reveal his own momentous (though heavily trailed) secret. Again, this tale recalls earlier Holocaust literature, in this case William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice. Now revealed as “Eli”, the grandfather admits that he is not from Odessa as previously claimed, but from a village near Trachimbrod. A gentile, he feels that he betrayed his Jewish friend Herschel during a Nazi round up. The officer in charge ordered the villagers to point to Jews in their midst, on pain of death. Though Eli’s choice was between pointing at Herschel or being killed along with his own wife and baby, his life has been ruined by guilt: “[Herschel] was my best friend [. . .]. And I murdered him” (228).

This repentant confession (which contrasts markedly with his earlier casual anti- Semitism) is also used to explain the dysfunction within the family, a sub-plot narrated in Alex’s letters to Jonathan. The baby saved by Eli’s so-called act of betrayal grew up to be Alex’s violent, alcoholic father. Thus it is suggested that the father’s personality problems, and their consequent effect on Alex, stem from the repressed secrets of his origin. Here Eli explains to Alex why he moved away from the scene of his shame after the war and resettled in Odessa:

I wanted so much for [my son] to live a good life, without death and without choices and without shame. But I was not a good father, I must inform you. I was the worst father. I desired to remove him from everything that was bad, but instead I gave him badness upon badness. A father is always responsible for how his son is. You must understand. (247) 155

At the end of the novel, Eli commits suicide. Alex, however, who symbolizes the economic problems of the former Soviet republics, in which the population look to the West while being constrained by their ties to the East, eventually stands up to his father, takes charge of his family, and gives up on his dream to move to America.

This strand of the novel, then, runs the gamut of well-worn Holocaust themes: sadistic cruelty, impossible choices, miraculous escape, traumatic memory of survivors, guilty secrets of bystanders, and corrosive legacy for subsequent generations. However, it is saved from cliché by the narrative verve with which the eye-witness testimony is related, using ungrammatical stream-of-consciousness to convey both psychological trauma and the temporal sweep of horrific events (a technique developed further in Foer’s later novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which deals with the events of “ 9/11”). Here, Eli is telling Alex how he remembers the Nazi round-up in his village:

[. . .] who is a Jew the General asked me again and I felt on my other hand the hand of Grandmother and I knew that she was holding your father and that he was holding you and that you were holding your children I am so afraid of dying I am soafraidofdying Iamsoafraidofdying Iamsoafraidofdying and I said he is a Jew who is a Jew the General asked and Herschel embraced my hand with much strength and he was my friend he was my best friend [. . .]. (250)

This idea of potentiality, expressed by the metaphor of “holding” one’s descendants within oneself, both reflects and inverts the theme of generational memory which is at the heart of the novel. This theme is the driving force of the second strand of the narrative, an imagined history of Trachimbrod focusing on the years 1791-1804 and 1934-41. This magical realist account owes much to Gabriel García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, not just in style but also in its themes of the circularity of history and the consequences of remembrance. It consists of short episodes that alternate with the present-day quest story. In the overarching narrative time of the novel, these chapters are being written by Jonathan, who has now returned to New York; he sends them to Alex for comments, just as Alex is writing and sending his “divisions” to Jonathan from Odessa. Jonathan recreates Trachimbrod in vast detail, including imagined entries in the shtetl’s “Book of Recurring Dreams” and “Book of Antecedents”, apparently in order to highlight the tragic poignancy of a lost community. However, the story of the shtetl’s main importance to Jonathan lies in the connections 156 he makes between its legends and his own presumed ancestors, as he audaciously moves beyond his relationship with his grandfather back through several further branches of his supposed family tree.

Jonathan’s account of the shtetl begins with the myth of how Trachimbrod got its name. In 1791, a passing wagon driven by “Trachim B” is said to have lost course and sunk to the bottom of the river, releasing a wealth of exotic flotsam to the surface. One item rescued from the accident is a baby, named Brod after the river in which she is found, and claimed by Jonathan as his five-time great-grandmother. The second legend relates to Brod’s husband, known as “the Kolker”, who miraculously survives a flourmill incident, leaving him with a circular saw embedded, coxcomb-like, in his skull. After dying a few years later, the Kolker’s body is bronzed into a statue, known as the “Dial” because the circular saw works as a sundial. The Dial becomes both a good luck charm for the Trachimbroders and a site of generational memory for the Kolker’s descendants. The narrative then jumps to the 1930s, focusing on Safran, Jonathan’s grandfather; here the two strands begin to merge, as this Safran corresponds to the man remembered by Lista in the present-day narrative. However, in the shtetl strand Safran’s story is turned into legend. Jonathan extrapolates wildly from short entries found in Safran’s journal to create an improbable tale of a sexually rapacious teenager with romantic longings. Extra-textually, meanwhile, Safran eventually merges with Foer’s historical grandfather: he marries, loses his wife and baby in the Nazi assault, escapes, and immigrates to the United States after the war.

Everything is Illuminated is, then, both structurally and thematically dualistic. The alternating narrative strands enable the climax to be approached from two different trajectories, one looking backwards in time while travelling towards in space, the other moving forward in time from the distant past. Both converge on the same geographical point, which gradually assumes the terrible status of inevitable target. Just as Jonathan and Alex reach the former site of Trachimbrod, the shtetl narrative reaches the time when the Germans arrived there in 1941. Thus the Holocaust as an event is represented through both the first-person memories of (fictional) survivors in the present and a magical realist “historical” account. This in turn enables a dual perspective on the Holocaust as theme: first, its continuing legacy, represented by the corrosive effect on victims’ descendants and the urge to search for traces; and second, the human loss of 157 families and communities, made poignant through description of their heritage, myths, genealogy, and daily lives. Simultaneously remembrance and commemoration, the novel seeks to show how the Holocaust both changed history and continues to reverberate in the present.

However, the crucial component of the novel’s duality is the structural relation between the characters “Jonathan Safran Foer” and “Alex Perchov”. Jonathan, signalled as a version of the author by correspondence of name, might be considered, like Sebald’s narrator, in terms of a narrative persona. However, in contrast to Sebald’s first-person focalisation, in Foer’s novel Jonathan is represented through the narration of another. Jonathan never speaks for himself; we only learn of him through Alex’s account. Thus while in Sebald’s narratives the self-reflexive interrogation of the ethics of writing is rendered as interiority (just as Seiffert portrays Micha’s self-questioning through italics), in Foer the issues are addressed at one remove through accusation by a third party. A couple of examples will illustrate this contrast. In The Emigrants, Sebald’s empathic narrative persona confronts his doubts in digressional asides. For example, in the section on “Max Ferber”, he explains how he spent a winter trying to write up an account of Ferber’s memories:

It was an arduous task. Often I could not get on for hours or days at a time, and not infrequently I unravelled what I had done, continuously tormented by scruples that were taking tighter hold and steadily paralysing me. These scruples concerned not only the subject of my narrative, which I felt I could not do justice to, but also the entire questionable business of writing. (230)

In Everything is Illuminated, in contrast, Jonathan’s scruples are rendered as Alex’s criticisms. Alex becomes, in effect, a site of self-reflexivity, commenting both on Jonathan’s actions in Ukraine and on his writing of the shtetl history. Here, for example, Alex gives his reaction to Jonathan’s exaggerated tale of Safran’s sexual conquests:

How can you do this to your grandfather, writing about his life in such a manner? Could you write in this manner if he was alive? And if not, what does that signify? [. . .] We are being very nomadic with the truth, yes? The both of us? Do you think that this is acceptable when we are writing about things that occurred? (179) 158

Such questions serve as a self-reflexive examination of the ethical issues raised by the writing of this novel. Choosing to express these doubts through another character’s reaction imposes a layer of distance between narration and protagonist that perhaps reflects the greater distance between Foer and his subject than is the case for Sebald, whose posture is one of close personal connection to the people he describes. Foer, two generations removed, perhaps cannot find a first-person voice to describe events in which he took no part, and, while appearing in his narrative, nevertheless chooses to invent another character through which to view his own (real and imagined) actions.

However, this only holds for one strand of the novel. In the other – the largely third- person narration of the “history” of the shtetl – Jonathan occasionally lapses into the first person to establish connection with his supposed ancestors. Describing the lottery in 1791 to find an adoptive father for Brod, Jonathan writes that the Rabbi “put the letters in her crib, vowing to give my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother – and, in a certain sense, me – to the author of the first note she grabbed for” (21). This “certain sense” is a deeply felt bloodline connection to his ancestors. When “Yankel D” becomes Brod’s father, Jonathan writes: “We were in good hands” (22). Here “we” refers to Brod, Jonathan, and all the generations in between. Later, he even describes his visit to Ukraine as a homecoming, despite never having set foot in the country: “I am the final piece of proof that all citizens who leave eventually return” (47). The theme of identification with ancestors also appears in the story of “Safran” in the 1930s, who in late adolescence realises that his resemblance to “the Kolker”, as preserved in the Dial statue, is a mixed blessing:

Safety and profound sadness: he was growing into his place in the family; he looked unmistakably like his father’s father’s father’s father’s father, and because of that, because his cleft chin spoke of the same mongrel gene-stew (stirred by the chefs of war, disease, opportunity, love, and false love), he was granted a place in a long line – certain assurances of being and permanence, but also a burdensome restriction of movement. He was no longer free. (121)

By embedding this theme of transgenerational connection into a novel dealing with the Holocaust, Foer may risk a problematic ethics of representation. Do his characters’ moments of ancestor-identification amount to what LaCapra calls “unchecked identification, vicarious experience, and surrogate victimage” (Writing 40)? Does Foer somehow claim affinity with his Jewish ancestors and thereby assume understanding of 159 their experience of persecution? I would suggest that Foer’s dualistic narrative, using multiple narrative voices, goes some way towards counteracting such tendencies by enabling him to approach the Holocaust with simultaneous proximity and distance, that is, with empathy rather than identification. A version of the author – Jonathan – takes part in the modern day story, as it were in person, and in his imagined history of Trachimbrod makes many explicit links between himself and his ancestors. Yet by using another character, Alex, to tell the present-day story and to criticize Jonathan’s writing and actions, Foer provides a site of self-reflexivity and critical objectivity. One way of considering this structure would be to read Alex as another side of Jonathan’s personality, or as his conscience; they combine, in effect, to form one narrative persona. Proximity and distance, represented by Jonathan and Alex respectively, thus co-exist in a dual persona, which has the potential to enable an empathic approach to history.

In Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (1997), Marianne Hirsch coins the influential term postmemory, which is “distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection” and which “characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth” (22). This appears to offer a fit with Foer’s combination of critical distance and personal proximity (though just how “dominated” his childhood was by the past is speculation). Moreover, just as Hirsch’s theoretical analysis of ancestral history and memory is underlaid by an interest in the power of family photographs, so the plot of Everything is Illuminated is driven by two such pictures which exert extraordinary motivating force upon the characters. A photograph of Alex’s grandfather alongside his wife, baby and murdered friend Herschel, discovered in one of the boxes of Trachimbrod remnants, prompts a war story and confession hitherto repressed for over forty years. Even more crucial to the narrative is the photograph of Jonathan’s grandfather and the family who sheltered him during the war, which inspires the journey to Europe in the first place.

Hirsch sees old family photographs as a powerful medium between memory and postmemory. To develop her thesis, she invokes Roland Barthes’ account, in Camera Lucida, of recognising his five-year-old mother in an old photograph. Barthes sees such photographs as “a physical, material emanation of a past reality” (Hirsch, Family 6). While noting that this assertion disregards both the representational nature of 160 photographs and their vulnerability to manipulation and falsification, Hirsch nevertheless argues that Barthes’ comments reveal a powerful promise of a kind of truth held within family photographs: “The picture exists because something was there, and thus, in my own family pictures, I, like Barthes, can hope to find some truth about the past, mine and my family’s – however mediated” (6). However, Hirsch departs from Barthes by arguing that photographs do not have any direct connection to the past: “Photography’s relation to loss and death is not to mediate the process of individual and collective memory but to bring the past back in the form of a ghostly revenant, emphasizing, at the same time, its immutable and irreversible pastness and irretrievability” (20). Postmemory, similarly, exists at one remove from the actual past. Its “connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation” (22). Postmemory, in common with photographs taken by people other than ourselves, contains an implicit acknowledgment of its intrinsic separation from the past to which it refers.

Foer, in his real-life journey to Europe, hoped that his grandfather’s photograph would lead to some truth about his family. Instead, his search revealed precisely the “immutable and irreversible pastness and irretrievability” of the past; as he stated in an interview, “I just found – nothing. At all” (Wagner 14). But in his novel, he could be said to use his postmemory, triggered by the photograph, to recreate the past through an “imaginative investment and creation”. However, the issue is more complicated. The example Hirsch uses is Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which dramatizes the interaction between the authorial persona and his survivor father. The father, Hirsch argues, mediates between Spiegelman’s memory and postmemory by providing commentary on three family photographs, which are moreover reproduced in the book alongside the comic strip panels. Hirsch terms this strategy the “aesthetics of postmemory” (40). However, in Everything is Illuminated, no such mediation is provided; the photograph is given to Jonathan without comment, only a cryptic inscription on its back. This signals the distance between Jonathan and the past, unbridgeable unless by the kind of imaginative identification undertaken in his “history” of Trachimbrod. The difference, of course, between Spiegelman and Foer is that the former is the child of survivors, a member of what is often referred to as the “second generation,” whereas the latter is born even later, thus enacting what might be termed a third-generation aesthetics of 161 post-postmemory.13 Foer’s “imaginative investment and creation” is entirely his own, and does not benefit, like Spiegelman’s, from the input of an eye-witness from the previous generation.

Here, then, it is the truth-telling, evidential nature of photography which is at stake. In her assessment of the second generation, Hirsch concurs with Barthes that some trace of the past may be found through photographs. But I would argue that third-generation texts of post-postmemory precisely refute this possibility. In The Dark Room, for example, the unreliability of photographic evidence is a recurring theme. In addition to the story of Micha discussed above, this “novella triptych” (as the critic Petra Rau calls it) includes two other, apparently unconnected narratives. In the first, “Helmut” is a young Berliner in the 1930s who, owing to a slight disability, does not join the widespread army mobilization but stays behind to witness the city’s destruction. An expert amateur photographer, he attempts to record the events on his camera but with limited success. On one occasion he comes upon a group of gypsies being herded into trucks by the police. Despite his best efforts, when he comes to develop the pictures they “convey none of the chaos and cruelty” (40), and even fail to clearly show what happened.

Seiffert’s second narrative, meanwhile, is set at the end of the war. 12-year-old Lore, the daughter of interned Nazi parents, leads her younger siblings on foot across divided Germany. Along the way she encounters photographs pinned up on trees depicting the horrors of the camps. However, this evidence is met with disbelief by others. As one young man is overhead saying on a train: “It’s all a set-up. The pictures are always out of focus, aren’t they? Or dark, or grainy. Anything to make them unclear. And the people in those photos are actors. The Americans have staged it all, maybe the Russians helped them, who knows” (175). Finally, in “Micha”, the protagonist steals photographs from his grandmother to help in his search for the truth about his grandfather, but instead he relies on the memory of an old man and his own reasoned deduction. Yet memory also fails when the distance is so great. As Efraim Sicher writes of Seiffert’s central metaphor: “The dark room, where the negatives of historical memory are developed, remains dark, shedding no light on knowledge of the past”

13 Christoph Ribbat also makes this point, noting that Foer is “twice removed from events,” (212) and that he “knows only ‘post-postmemory’ (because that is all there is to know)” (213). 162

(Holocaust Novel 196). The same may be said of Everything is Illuminated, whose title should be read as deeply ironic. Jonathan’s photograph of “Augustine” proves to be a red herring; she is never found and never will be. In this novel, though photographs provoke the search, they cannot in themselves lead to knowledge of the past when the chain of human connection is broken by generational distance. Where Spiegelman’s father was on hand to help explain his ambiguous photographs, Foer’s pictures exist at one remove from lived reality.

Despite this difference, Spiegelman and Foer, as fellow Americans, share what Hirsch calls a sense of “diasporic” or “temporal and spatial exile” (245) from their ancestry. Hirsch argues that European-extraction Jews of her (second) generation feel a “sense of exile from a world we have never seen and which, because it was irreparably changed or destroyed not by natural or historical change over time but by the sudden violent annihilation of the Holocaust, we will never see” (242). (In Everything is Illuminated, this irreparable destruction is illustrated by the empty field where Trachimbrod once stood.) Hirsch goes on: “None of us ever knows the world of our parents. How much more ambivalent is this curiosity for children of Holocaust survivors, exiled from a world that has ceased to exist, that has been violently erased” (242-3). This raises the question: How much more ambivalent is such curiosity for grandchildren of survivors like Foer (and Jonathan)? If children of survivors “forge an aesthetics of postmemory with photographs as the icons of their ambivalent longing” (246), what is the nature of an aesthetics of post-postmemory, similarly curious, similarly inspired by photographs, but containing even less hope of direct connection to the past?

An important dimension of this aesthetic is socio-geographical. One way of viewing Everything is Illuminated is through the lens of twenty-first century American attitudes towards the Holocaust. This has certainly been the focus of the few articles on this novel that have so far appeared. Aliki Varvogli, for example, notes that for Jonathan, “the trauma of the Holocaust resides in Europe” (89), that is, his conception of the past is as geographical as it is historical. Echoing Hirsch’s point about temporal and spatial exile, Varvogli continues:

His [Jonathan’s] desire to uncover his grandfather’s past and thus complete the picture of his family history shows that even a young American, born in the late 163

1970s, cannot have a complete sense of his identity and his place in the world while he remains ignorant of how European history affected his own forefathers. To be Jewish American, the novel suggests, is to be somehow incomplete, since part of the meaning of that identity is linked with a past that happened elsewhere. (89)

Here a claim is made for Jewish American experience which may just as easily apply to anyone with an immigrant background. Similarly, Lee Behlman, who analyses Foer alongside two other contemporary writers, Michael Chabon and Nathan Englander, argues:

What stands out about the recent fictions under discussion here is the degree to which they emphasize the now-vast temporal and cultural distance between late twentieth and twenty-first century America and the Holocaust, as well as the gap between our time and the American experience of the Holocaust for previous generations. (60-1)

Again, this “distance” is surely common to all historical fiction, not just American novels about the Holocaust. Here I am perhaps being disingenuous; both Varvogli and Behlman’s arguments spring from the novel’s explicit engagement with the idea of America through Alex’s misconceptions about the country and the mismatch of cultures figured by Jonathan’s experience in Ukraine. However, articles like Varvogli’s that emphasize “Jewish American experience” may serve to reinforce the tendentious suggestion that Holocaust memory in some way resides in, or belongs to, the modern- day United States. Indeed, what seems to be informing the American focus both in Foer’s novel and its critiques by others is the recent outpouring of self-criticism in American discourse, most notably articulated in Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life (1999) and Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry (2000).

Finkelstein calls the way the idea of the “Holocaust” has become central to modern American culture a “fraudulent misappropriation of history for ideological purposes” (61). For Finkelstein these purposes are often to do with economic appropriation and exploitation. However, as Novick points out, they also may conceal an evasive and morally reprehensible Eurocentricism or “screen memory” that serves to obscure the guilt and reparation owed by America to its own history, for example the genocide of natives by European settlers and the enslavement of African-Americans. As Novick puts it: 164

[. . .] the pretense that the Holocaust is an American memory – that Americans, either diffusely, as part of Western civilization, or specifically, as complicit bystanders, share responsibility for the Holocaust – works to devalue the notion of historical responsibility. It leads to the shirking of those responsibilities that do belong to Americans as they confront their past, their present, and their future. (15, emphasis in original)

This argument could, of course, lead to an inward-looking, parochial stance that disregards Holocaust history. Neil Levi makes this point, noting that the concept of “screen memories” originates in Freud’s 1899 essay “Über Deckerinnerungen,” which draws on the German verb decken, to cover. Levi argues that this leads to a problem: any balanced comparison of collective memories is difficult if one is always presumed to “cover” the other. Levi further points out that for Freud,

screen memories are distinguished by a vivid but insignificant content. If we take the psychoanalytic term seriously, then those who promote the idea of the Holocaust as screen memory might be seen as proposing that the Holocaust is an improbable, even puzzling thing for certain countries to remember: why remember events that took place at such geographical distance from your own nation? The borders of the nation state become the boundaries of proper and significant national memory (126).

Christoph Ribbat takes up this point, putting Foer’s novel in the context of the conflicting claims in that country for African-American and Jewish suffering. Echoing Levi, Ribbat notes that this contest has led to a fear that “[t]he murder of the European Jews might become a marginal subject” (202), a fear which novels like Foer’s may serve to allay. Susanne Rohr goes further by arguing that Everything is Illuminated represents a critique of Holocaust discourse, rather than merely a reflection or product of the intellectual climate in which it was written. Rohr says that Foer’s novel addresses not the Holocaust itself but the “rhetoric of Holocaust representation” (241) which has accrued since the event. It deals with “not the unrepresentable but the discourse of the unrepresentable” (242, emphasis in original). For Rohr, this excuses the farcical and slapstick humour of the novel, which is aimed not at the Holocaust itself, but instead “targets the transfer of knowledge, commemoration practices, processes of medialization and Americanization involved in representations of the Shoah” (244). 165

Rohr highlights an important element of the novel, but this is not the whole story. Everything is Illuminated cannot be reduced to a disinterested, distanced, self- consciously postmodernist meta-discourse, for three reasons: first, the personal investment of its author; secondly, the use of first-person memories of (fictional) survivors; and thirdly, the correspondence between “Trachimbrod” and a real shtetl of that name, which, like Foer’s creation, was destroyed during World War II.

This third aspect, the re-imagining of real events, usually goes by the name of historical fiction. However, Foer’s novel aims to transcend genre fiction through its use of magical realism, complications of narrative time and voice, and apparent lack of reference to the historical record. Yet by fictionalising events related to the Holocaust, the novel strays into ethically contested territory. In order to address this issue I will begin by comparing Foer’s Trachimbrod story with two historical documents of differing provenance and authority: the “Yizkor” book of that shtetl, and Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (1961).

Yizkor books, which commemorate and memorialize individual communities destroyed in the Holocaust, are usually written by surviving former residents. Published in Israel, in the languages of Hebrew and Yiddish, they are subject to digitization and translation projects which make them available both for individuals tracing personal genealogy and for more general educational and consciousness-raising purposes. The Yizkor Book Project at www.jewishgen.org/yizkor enables place name searches which call up digitized versions of the books themselves and supplementary geographical and historical information.

In Everything is Illuminated, Foer refers to his shtetl both as Trachimbrod, the name its residents use, and Sofiowka, the official name given by local authorities. A search for these names on the Yizkor database produces the same result: a book published in 1988 as Ha-ilan ve-shoreshav; sefer korot T’’L Zofiowka-Ignatowka, or The tree and the roots: the history of T. L. (Sofyovka and Ignatovka). Several authors are listed, the first being Yakov Vainer. Meanwhile, the database confirms Trachimbrod as one of the many names given to this settlement over the centuries. This suggests that Foer’s real- life grandfather was from this place, or that Foer picked up the name elsewhere, possibly knowing that it was a real community. In the novel, Jonathan gives precise 166 geographical co-ordinates for Trachimbrod: it “rest[s] twenty-three kilometers southeast of Lvov, four north of Kolki, and straddl[es] the Polish-Ukrainian border like a twig alighted on a fence” (50-1). This differs significantly from the location given in the Yizkor database, which places it much farther north, in the area near Luts’k. Though the difference is minor in terms of historical significance – both locations are within the region that has changed hands between Poland and Ukraine at various times over the last two hundred years, and which was comprehensively decimated by the Nazi mobile killing units – it remains curious that Foer chose to give a precise, but apparently deliberately wrong, geographical siting for his shtetl. (It should be noted, however, that neither siting corresponds to a current settlement; just as Foer’s characters find only an empty field, there is no Sofiowka or Trachimbrod on modern maps, testament to the “success” of the Nazi operation.) Another “factual” discrepancy is the date of the shtetl’s founding, given by Foer as 1791; the Yizkor account suggests 1827 at the earliest. It is not known whether Foer used the Yizkor book as a source. Nevertheless, perhaps these geographical and temporal discrepancies are intended to distance the novel from any “real” history of Trachimbrod, a subtle shift of place and time that parallels the symbolic and stylistic modal shifts imposed by the author.

To be sure, the historical accuracy of the Yizkor account is itself questionable, not least because of its Zionist bias and understandable desire to emphasize the positive side of the Jewish character. Indeed, Foer’s shtetl story and the Yizkor account can be read as representing competing, and equally tendentious, claims about the nature of “Jewishness”. Foer’s Trachimbroders are eccentric, superstitious, sexually incontinent and obsessed with memory and tradition. This may be seen, for example, in their obsession with “Brod”, the mysterious young girl Jonathan claims as his ancestor:

By her twelfth birthday, my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother had received at least one proposal of marriage from every citizen of Trachimbrod: from men who already had wives, from broken old men who argued on stoops about things that might or might not have happened decades before, from boys without armpit hair, from women with armpit hair, and from the deceased philosopher Pinchas T, who, in his only notable paper, “To the Dust: From Man You Came and to Man You Shall Return,” argued it would be possible, in theory, for life and art to be reversed. (90) 167

In contrast, the Yizkor account praises the Jews of this area for their “national faithfulness, love of the people, love of family, good friendship, morality and humanity, enthusiastic popularity, Jewish charm and humane emphasis on a life of spiritual nobility, honesty and modesty” (III). Foer’s shtetl appears as a cohesive, autonomous community, untouched by the outside world until the arrival of the German army in 1941, while the Yizkor book portrays a helpless group of individuals shunted from place to place as successive edicts from the Russian authorities constantly endanger and disrupt their lives. While Foer’s approach serves in its way to praise the Jewish way of life by emphasising its unsuspecting innocence – heightening the rhetorical effect of the community’s eventual destruction – the Yizkor authors’ stress on enforced assimilation, compulsory military service and enforced agriculturalization, all leading to a perpetual struggle to survive, makes the generational and community continuity central to Foer’s vision appear highly improbable.

One way that Foer’s assertion of continuity is expressed is through the fictional community’s founding legend, which is invoked repeatedly over the centuries:

It was March 18, 1791, when Trachim B’s double-axle wagon either did or did not pin him against the bottom of the Brod River. The young W twins were the first to see the curious flotsam rising to the surface: wandering snakes of white string, a crushed-velvet glove with outstretched fingers, barren spools, schmootzy pince-nez, rasp- and boysenberries, feces, frillwork, the shards of a shattered atomizer, the bleeding red-ink script of a resolution: I will...I will.... (8)

This myth is dismissed by the Yizkor book, which gives a more prosaic account of the establishment of the shtetl:

[. . .] a number of Jews from the adjoining villages got together and bought from a certain squire whose name was Truchen a parcel of land covered with forests and a swamp which was known by the name of the Brod (swamp in Russian) of Truchen and in Yiddish ‘truchenbrod’ and so the place was called by the people until the bitter end – the holocaust. (One shouldn't take seriously the story of that a peasant by the name of Truchen was drowned there in the swamp, and the place was called by his name and accident, one cannot accept that Jews during the course of generations would call the place where they lived by a name based on such a banal story). (XXVI) 168

Such non-acceptance signifies the determination of the Yizkor authors to portray the Jews of Trachimbrod as strong, wilful and forward-looking, in contrast to Foer’s “banal”, whimsical, myth-obsessed innocents.

This innocence becomes tragic in Foer’s description of the reaction of the Trachimbroders to the arrival of the Germans in 1941. In this part of the story, there is a nine-month gap between hearing the first bombs nearby and the Nazis’ destruction of the shtetl itself. Why did they not attempt to flee to safety? Jonathan writes:

Trachimbrod itself was overcome by a strange inertness. The citizenry [. . .] now sat on their hands. Activity was replaced with thought. Memory. Everything reminded everyone of something, which seemed winsome at first – when early birthdays could be recalled by the smell of an extinguished match, or the feeling of one’s first kiss by sweat in the palm – but quickly became devitalizing. Memory begat memory begat memory. Villagers became embodiments of that legend they had been told so many times, of mad Sofiowka, swaddled in white string, using memory to remember memory, bound in an order of remembrance, struggling in vain to remember a beginning or end. (258)

Echoing One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which the residents of Macondo wallow in nostalgia while the civil war approaches, this passage takes the familiar trope of Jewish obsession with memory and turns it into an obstacle to survival. Yet Foer’s narrator is quick to universalize this experience: “They waited to die, and we cannot blame them, because we would do the same, and we do do the same” (262, emphasis in original).

Another writer who has addressed the question of Jewish reaction to the impending catastrophe is Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg. In The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), Hilberg argues that their response to the Nazi threat was a “disaster” (24), and insists upon “the role of the Jews in their own destruction” (123). For Hilberg, Jews over the centuries had learned to deal with persecution through alleviation, compliance, evasion and paralysis, only very rarely displaying resistance or aggression. More specifically, in relation to the mobile killing operations in the region where Foer’s novel is set, Hilberg advances further reasons for this passivity. Recent history had taught the Jews of this area to expect better treatment from Germans than from Russians; at the end of World War I “the Germans had come as quasi-liberators” (123). Also, owing to censorship of the Russian media, “[t]he Jews of Russia were ignorant of 169 the fate that had overtaken the Jews in Nazi Europe” (124). The result, according to Hilberg, was not only a lack of resistance but also no attempt to flee:

It is a fact, now confirmed by many documents, that the Jews made an attempt to live with Hitler. In many cases they failed to escape while there was still time and, more often still, they failed to step out of the way when the killers were already upon them. There are moments of impending disaster when almost any conceivable action will only make suffering worse or bring final agonies closer. In such situations the victims may lapse into paralysis. The reaction is barely overt, but in 1941 a German observer noted the symptomatic fidgeting of the Jewish community in Galicia as it awaited death, between shocks of killing operations, in “nervous despair.” (22-3)

“Fidgeting” and “nervous despair” brought on by multiple historical, psychological and practical factors are transformed, in Foer’s story, into a vision of a community consumed with (and indeed “paralysed” by) remembrance. To be sure, the outcome is the same: the systematic destruction of entire communities as part of a wider genocidal plan. But what exactly is the relation between the differing accounts by Hilberg and Foer of the same historical moment? How can we understand the categories of history and fiction that are at play here? And what are the ethical issues attendant on the transformation of controversial historical “fact” into fiction?

One writer who has explored these questions is the French hermeneutic philosopher Paul Ricoeur, whose Time and Narrative (1985) has been called “the central contemporary study of historical fiction” (Middleton and Woods 68). In his chapter on “The Interweaving of History and Fiction,” Ricoeur begins by arguing that it is only through empathic imagination that the writer is able to represent the Other. This empathy consists of an act of “seeing as...” or “providing oneself a figure of...” (181). Thus the writer’s imagination includes an “ocular dimension” (185) which expresses itself in narrative through figurative language. Meanwhile, the reader enters into a “pact” with the author, suspending disbelief and entering the “realm of illusion”. For Ricoeur, this “fiction-effect” (186) is crucial to historical writing about horrific events such as the Holocaust. Fiction’s “controlled illusion” provides a balance between the “illusion of presence” and “critical distance,” a balance which prevents the “individuation” produced by horrible events being experienced by the reader as mere “blind feeling” (188). Instead, the narrator shoulders some of the burden, through the 170 ocular dimension: “Fiction gives eyes to the horrified narrator. Eyes to see and to weep” (188). This formulation appears to imply a truth claim: that the “eyes” are “seeing” the past event as it really was. Ricoeur’s defence of this claim lies in his idea of how fiction works. Fictional narrative attains a “quasi-past” that is “quasi-historical” (190) in that the events described are past facts for the narrator. This produces a “‘pastlike’ note” of verisimilitude in the sense of what “might have been” (191). Moreover, this effect works as an ethical constraint on the novelist, equivalent to the historian’s debt to the dead. Fiction is “internally bound by its obligation to its quasi- past” (192).

This defence initially appears strong, especially when considered alongside my theory of narrative empathy developed in the present study, a simultaneous gesture of proximity and distance that echoes Ricoeur’s “controlled illusion”. However, in these terms, Ricoeur’s analysis would appear to render all fictional narration empathic. In this reading, the “eyes” of the narrator provide both proximity (the “illusion of presence”) and critical distance simultaneously. This “ocular dimension” provides an inherent layer of separation that reinforces the knowledge of the other as other, while combining with the processes of “individuation” and “illusion” as part of an apparently universal fictional trajectory. Taken together with its alleged “obligation to its quasi- past,” fictional narrative emerges in Ricoeur’s account as an ideal empathic medium in which to render horrific events such as the Holocaust.

However, Ricoeur’s schema is too limited to encompass a novel like Everything is Illuminated. Ricoeur’s theory places the narrator, rather than the author, at the centre of the action. Both author and reader “imagine” the event through the “eyes” of the narrator. The author relies on this layer of separation to ensure that he or she is positioned towards the event in an ethically responsible manner, while the reader enters into a “pact” with the author and thereby implicitly trusts the narrator to tell the truth. But it is clear that any narrative that deviates from standard past-tense realism and consistency of narration will problematize such a schema. In Everything is Illuminated, we no longer have a straightforward case of a narrator who is trusted by the reader to do the “seeing” for her. Foer’s novel challenges Ricoeur’s thesis both through its self- reflexive foregrounding of the problematics of writing and the presence of the dual authorial persona. The “pact” between author and reader that for Ricoeur is embodied 171 by the narrator is deliberately undermined in this novel; the “illusion” is broken. As a result, any sense of an “obligation to [the] quasi-past” that guarantees the ethical standpoint of the author or narrator is similarly fractured. This latter problem is crucial to Foer’s novel, which as we have seen dares to address such contested themes as the Jewish character and the Holocaust itself through a combination of farce and tragedy.

If Ricoeur’s theory of historical fiction fails to account for Foer’s strategy, what other ethical justification might there be for his fictional treatment of the Holocaust? One explanation might be found through an investigation of the personal investment of the author in his text. Foer, by using his own name as the protagonist, has in a sense forced himself into the hermeneutic structure of his novel. Asked in an interview about the relationship between his real-life journey to Ukraine and the subsequent writing of Everything is Illuminated, the author responded:

‘There wasn’t an Alex. [. . .]. There wasn’t a grandfather, there wasn’t a dog, there wasn’t a woman I found who resembled the woman in the book – but I did go, and I just found – nothing. At all. It wasn’t like a literary, interesting kind of nothing, an inspiring, or a beautiful nothing, it was really like: nothing. It’s not like anything else I’ve ever experienced in my life. In a certain sense the book wasn’t an act of creation so much as it was an act of replacement. I encountered a hole – and it was like the hole that I found was in myself, and one that I wanted to try to fill up.’ (Wagner 14)

This opposition between “creation” and “replacement” is crucial. Earlier I suggested that Foer’s use of his post-postmemory necessitates, by its very distance from the past, what Hirsch calls an “imaginative investment and creation”. Does Foer’s statement deny this element? In saying that “the book wasn’t an act of creation,” Foer is not of course disavowing its fictional status. Nevertheless, the statement may imply that there’s a kind of truth he’s searching for beyond fiction, both about his lost ancestors and about the losses of the Holocaust in general.

The response to such implicit truth claims has been strongly influenced in recent years by the Wilkomirski affair (described in detail in Chapter 3 of the present study). Bruno Dössekker, posing as “Binjamin Wilkomirski”, claimed to have been in concentration camps as a child, but investigations by Daniel Ganzfried and others have since proved that he spent the war safe in Switzerland with a succession of foster families. As Stefan 172

Maechler has suggested, Dössekker appears to have replaced his genuine childhood trauma of adoption with Holocaust “memories” that he has appropriated from others, and which he apparently believes on some level to be his own (268-73). Dössekker/Wilkomirski thus claims a past that is not his. Could Foer be accused of making a comparable claim? Though his grandfather really was a Holocaust survivor with a European ancestral history, Foer, born two generations later in a different continent, has no direct personal connection to the trauma of the Holocaust except by an act of imaginative identification or creation which he nevertheless disavows. Clearly, Foer’s post-postmemory has a different status to a claim to directly recall the past, but by apparently denying his creative act Foer threatens to stray into problematic territory of identification with a past in which he took no part.

However, by calling his novel an “act of replacement” rather than an “act of creation” Foer hints at the way Everything is Illuminated self-reflexively acknowledges such problems of truth and representation. Chambers Dictionary defines replace as “to put back; to provide a substitute for; to take the place of; to supplant”. Replacement therefore means (at least) two connected things: the act of putting something back where it once was, and the act of substituting one thing or person for another. We could say that Foer’s novel aims to re-place the absent Trachimbrod with an imagined version, to put something back that has been taken away. Or we could say that the novel acknowledges the permanent absence of the original Trachimbrod (and its destroyed writings) and provides a substitute for it (in the form of new writing). Foer in this sense could be said to attempt to substitute content/presence for emptiness/absence. As Jonathan’s grandfather Safran says of his Gypsy lover’s tall tales, “he knew that the origin of a story is always an absence, and he wanted her to live among presences” (230).

Foer’s gesture may be better understood in the light of Derrida’s insight that presence is always deferred in an infinite chain of “supplements”. Through his deconstruction of Rousseau, Derrida noted that supplement means not just an addition, but also a replacement or substitute: “[. . .] the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void” (145, emphasis in original). This “void” may correspond to the “hole” Foer found that he wanted to “fill up”. But as Derrida argues, this is an impossible task. To attempt it 173 reveals “an infinite chain, ineluctably multiplying the supplementary mediations that produce the sense of the very thing they defer: the mirage of the thing itself, of immediate presence, of originary perception” (157).

Everything is Illuminated acknowledges this impossibility through its dual persona structure. Foer replaces (or supplements) himself with “Jonathan” (his replacement or supplement), whose narrative voice is itself replaced (supplemented) by that of “Alex”. The novel may now be seen to be about the inevitable absence at the heart of any attempt to recapture the past. Its title is heavily ironic; very little of substance is “illuminated”, only abstract ideas of personal growth, traumatic memory, and so on. The site of Trachimbrod is an empty field; Augustine cannot be found. Through its narrative structure, and its multiple representations within representations, Everything is Illuminated acknowledges that, as a text, it can only refer to itself and its chain of replacements, never to real people or events from the past. It also mournfully shows the impossibility of ever knowing one’s ancestors, the abyss at the heart of any such attempt at transgenerational identification. As Derrida writes: “We are dispossessed of the longed-for presence in the gesture of language by which we attempt to seize it” (141).

This then is the third-generation aesthetic of post-postmemory, a self-reflexive dialogue with the self, history, and the idea of authorship itself, that nevertheless achieves a degree of empathy by combining these distancing elements with the presence of the author through a dual narrative persona. In this process, Foer avoids over-identification through the dramatization of its very impossibility, as part of a structure that embeds within itself the distance between self and other. Taken together, these elements combine to move beyond the limits of historical fiction as Ricoeur describes it, enabling a relationship between narrative and the past which might be described as “transgenerational empathy”. 174

Conclusion: the future of transgenerational empathy

In this study, I have suggested that some approaches to writing contemporary Holocaust narratives are more appropriate than others. Certain writers, exemplified in this study by “Binjamin Wilkomirski” and Anne Michaels, seem merely to identify with rather than empathize with the past. Others, however, respond to the ethical and epistemological challenges raised by the subject matter by adopting narrative strategies that correspond to an extent with LaCaprian empathy, which I have defined as a simultaneous gesture of proximity and distance. W. G. Sebald, for example, transcends the dangers of identification through what I have called his “empathic narrative persona”, a figure one generation removed from the Holocaust who nevertheless engages in acts of personal connection to its victims. Likewise, Jonathan Safran Foer’s “post-postmemory” finds expression through what I have named his “dual persona”, enabling Foer, in Everything is Illuminated, to achieve an empathic relation to the past, despite his even greater generational and geographical distance from the event. The stance of writers such as Sebald and Foer may be termed “transgenerational empathy” to account for the way their response to traumatic events is mediated by generational distance. I have suggested that this dynamic occurs in the hermeneutic space opened up by Gadamer’s “fusion of horizons”, whereby historical understanding is achieved by expanding one’s limited purview without leaving it behind, thereby, in Gadamer’s words, “rising to a higher universality that overcomes not only our own particularity but also that of the other” (305).

However, this tentative theory of transgenerational empathy is as yet far from complete. I would like to suggest two areas of future inquiry that might help realise its potential: what could be termed its temporal dimension, and the kinds of narrative personae found in the work of other writers. One productive example might be Philip Roth. In a long and varied career, Roth has often alluded the Holocaust, whether to satirize its use by Jewish-Americans for their own ends – as in The Ghost Writer (1979) – or to show how it pervades the psyche of apparently unaffected American Jews – as when the narrator’s dying mother writes the word “Holocaust” when asked for her name in The Anatomy Lesson (1983). Another Roth novel, Operation Shylock (1993), deals with the legacy of the Holocaust in 1980s Israel by incorporating the trial of John Demjanjuk (the so- called “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka) and the theory of “Diasporism”, which argues 175 that Israeli Jews should re-populate the European “homelands” from whence they came. Notwithstanding this rare foray abroad, which is any case narrated from a visitor’s viewpoint, Roth’s American perspective is always foregrounded in his novels. But as Michael Rothberg argues,

it is less the Holocaust and its impact on America that obsesses Roth than the unbridgeable distance between the Holocaust and American life – and the inauthenticity of most attempts to lessen that distance. Such an observation does not mean that Roth minimizes or relativizes the significance of the Holocaust. To the contrary, he has been, as Milowitz suggests, one of the earliest and most articulate writers to address the genocide’s devastating singularity. But its singularity is precisely not American. To use a term inspired by Roth, the Holocaust is something like the “counter-history” of American life. Emphasising the Holocaust’s distance rather than its overwhelming proximity leads to a formulation of the central paradox of Roth’s quite original perspective on the Shoah: the greater the significance accorded to the Holocaust as an event of modern history, the more distant a role it plays in the lives of American Jews. (53)

Rothberg goes on to cite several places where Roth emphasizes the “distance between Jewish-American security and European tragedy” (62). This insistence on Roth’s use of distance at the expense of proximity would appear to preclude the writer from empathy in narrative as I have defined it, which requires a balance of the two. However, Rothberg’s argument leaves out the personal connection Roth demonstrates through his use of personae. Of the three books that have the Holocaust as a central theme – The Ghost Writer, Operation Shylock and The Plot Against America (2004) – two are narrated by a character named “Philip Roth”, a figure Alan Cooper calls the writer’s “primal persona” (243). By appearing “in person” as a version of himself who engages both with Jewish persecution in the Nazi era (The Plot Against America) and the continuing reverberations of the Holocaust for contemporary Israeli politics (Operation Shylock), Roth builds in a crucial dimension of proximity through personal connection.

“Philip Roth” is the narrator of The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988), Deception (1990), Patrimony: A True Story (1991), Operation Shylock, and The Plot Against America. Like another of Roth’s alter-egos, “Nathan Zuckerman”, this figure has close biographical connections to its author but enough differences to preclude any assumption of direct correspondence. In this respect he resembles Sebald’s persona. However, unlike Sebald (and Foer), Roth was alive during World War II. Born in 1933, 176 he was raised in Newark, New Jersey among assimilated Jewish immigrants. This adds an extra dimension that enables him, in The Plot Against America, to insert elements from his own childhood into the history of that time. Where Sebald talks to survivors, and Foer recreates his lost ancestors, Roth in this novel draws on his own memories in order to imagine what Jewish persecution by a Nazi-inspired American administration would have been like.

In this subtle take on the “what-if?” historical novel, Roosevelt loses the election in 1940 to a Republican party led by the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, whose non- interventionist platform later extends to a pact with Hitler and insidious policies of forced relocation and assimilation against the Jewish population of the United States. These events are seen through the lives of the Roths of Newark – young Philip, his parents, brother and extended family – who as assimilated American Jews are perfectly placed to be torn apart by conflicting loyalties of race and nation. Thus the build-up of tension, culminating in riots and pogroms before Roosevelt returns and America joins the war, is depicted simultaneously in the political and domestic spheres. In the context of the present study, Roth’s placing of a version of himself into a reimagined history of America, in which the Jewish population is persecuted in ways that cannot help be compared to 1930s Germany, might be construed as an inappropriate identification with the fate of the European Jews with whom he has always previously asserted his difference. As Rothberg says, “it is almost as if the Jews of Newark are the wretched of Belsen” (64). But I would suggest that Roth’s stance is empathic not identificatory, since his approach to the Holocaust combines distance, through geographical displacement and factual distortion, with deep personal connection, based on semi- fictionalized yet direct memories of the past (in contrast to the post- and post- postmemories of Sebald and Foer).

Indeed, this more literal connection with the past leads to Roth’s characteristic double- voicedness, in which the adult looks back on the experiences of the child, giving a perfectly integrated dual perspective that combines nostalgia with fear, experience with innocence, distance with proximity. Moreover, Roth’s dual perspective suggests how the empathic dialectic between distance and proximity could be figured more closely in terms of the temporal dimension. Clearly, time does not always work in a logical and linear fashion. It has been many decades since the Holocaust yet it sometimes feels 177 very close. As discussed in Chapter 1, trauma theory would suggest that time is transcended by repetitious and dissociated memories, though this relies on a problematic view of traumatic memories being unmediated by subjectivity. Nevertheless, the interval between traumatic event and its representation is a subject of wide debate. Was 2006 “too soon” after the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 to release the film United 93? Is there an optimum lapse of time that would enable empathic representations of traumatic events? Could a narrative written now about the English Civil War achieve the same powerful combination of proximity and distance as Sebald’s explorations of exile and loss or Foer’s depiction of the doomed search for the past? If not, what level of personal memory and connection is necessary? How many “post-”s may be prefixed to memory before it ceases to be worthy of the name? In the case of the Holocaust, the answer to these questions will only become apparent with time. 178

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