The Strange Play of Traumatic Reality: Enchantment in Jewish American Literature

THE STRANGE PLAY OF TRAUMATIC REALITY: ENCHANTMENT IN JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE Sarah R. Workman A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2016 Approved by: Erin Carlston Tyler Curtain María DeGuzmán Dean Franco Heidi Kim © 2016 Sarah R. Workman ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Sarah R. Workman: THE STRANGE PLAY OF TRAUMATIC REALITY: ENCHANTMENT IN JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE (Under the Direction of Erin G. Carlston and Heidi Kim) This project analyzes the play of narrative worlds in the work of Bernard Malamud (The Magic Barrel), Michael Chabon (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union), Nicole Krauss (Great House), Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated), Nathan Englander (“The Tumblers”), and the Coen brothers (A Serious Man). These texts self-consciously dramatize the question: How do we know what we think we know about Holocaust history? The serious play of fantasy registers a historical shift in Jewish American literature towards metafictional approaches to mediating Holocaust history, exposing the unconsidered intersections between speculative fiction and historiography. This work flouts interpretive conventions of narrative ontologies to problematize meaning-making in Holocaust studies, subverting assumptions that this history is either knowable or not knowable. In addition to showing the limited ability of historical realism to incorporate Holocaust representation in an American literary context, the project highlights the ways in which fantasy genres—long discarded to the bottom of the critical dustbin—mediate history, absence, and loss. To conceptualize this contemporary turn to genre-mixing, I develop a critical schemata entitled enchantment. This framework encapsulates the strange commensurability between the fantasy mode of storytelling and its representation of traumatic history. Reflecting the third generation’s lack of first-hand experience, enchantment iii defamiliarizes historical narratives, producing a critical apparatus that enables new discussions of how aesthetic play structures the intergenerational transfer of Holocaust memory. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION. MEANING-MAKING AND FANTASY MODES: HISTORY, GENRE, AND ENCHANTMENT IN POST-WAR JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE........................................................................................................... 1 Genre-mixing: Defining the Terms of Impossibility and Play ..........................................17 A Genealogy of Enchantment ............................................................................................31 Chapter Summaries ............................................................................................................47 CHAPTER 1. THE AESTHETICS OF INDIRECTION IN BERNARD MALAMUD’S EARLY SHORT FICTION ..................................................................................56 “Why Fantasy?” .................................................................................................................63 Delusions of History: Fantasy in “Lady of the Lake” and “The Last Mohican” ...............75 Fantastic Spaces and Inter-ethnic Dialogue in Malamud’s Short Fiction ..........................95 CHAPTER 2. ENCHANTED OBJECTS: “VIBRANT MATTER” AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ABSENCE IN GREAT HOUSE AND EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED ..............................................................................................104 Animating the Inanimate: Enchanted Objects in Great House ........................................114 The Wreckage of History in Everything Is Illuminated ...................................................134 The Novel as Enchanted Object .......................................................................................149 CHAPTER 3. “STRANGE TIMES TO BE A JEW”: THE REDEMPTION OF MEYER LANDSMAN IN THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION ...................................163 Unsettling the Strange Space of Sitka: Slipstream Storytelling .......................................173 Plotting Histories: The Grim Reality of Jewish Terrorism ..............................................190 The Evolution of Meyer Landsman: Romancing the Hard-Boiled ..................................193 v CHAPTER 4. STORIES FROM A POSTMODERN CHELM: THE ABSURD LOGIC OF HISTORY IN THE COEN BROTHERS’ A SERIOUS MAN AND NATHAN ENGLANDER’S “THE TUMBLERS” ................................209 The Postmodern Schlemiel ..............................................................................................213 “Accept the Mystery”: The Play of Uncertainty in A Serious Man .................................215 “Hup! Hup! We must Tumble!”: Survival and the Carnivalesque in “The Tumblers” ...........................................................................................................244 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................260 WORKS CITED ..........................................................................................................................270 vi INTRODUCTION MEANING-MAKING AND FANTASY MODES: HISTORY, GENRE, AND ENCHANTMENT IN POST-WAR JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE “Fantasies have become literally true—a principle, as we shall have occasion to see, that was to have a profound shaping effect on the writer’s conception of his world. Fantasy, of course, had been employed for centuries by artists, for its own sake and to offer commentary on the human scene—Bosch populated his canvases with creatures of fantasy; and the records of myth and literature, from the Minotaur to the Houyhnhnms and beyond, are crowded with comparable distortions of reality—sometimes comic, sometimes tragically earnest—and though the reader or observer is often absorbed by these universes of the imagination, he never mistakes them for literal reality. But when fantasies become literally true, the artist, the writer, must record a reality that has become an expression of the impossible, at the same time convincing his audience that whatever distortions he employs do not negate, but clarify reality and subject it to an illuminating metamorphosis” –Lawrence Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (1977) (23-25) As Lawrence Langer remarks, when writers and artists employ fantasy to represent the Holocaust they face complicated issues of rhetorical strategy. But when the human scene is something of the incomprehensible and inhuman in nature, when the reality of the Holocaust “transcends” the imagination as Elie Wiesel1 and others contend, what does fantasy illuminate? In other words, when reality becomes fantastical, how does literature respond? Does recourse to the fantastical merely add to the mythology of the already incomprehensible? In Nathan Englander’s short story “The Tumblers,” (2000) the narrator tells us that this story is “an absurd undertaking. But then again. No more unbelievable than the reality from which they’d escaped, no more unfathomable than the magic of disappearing Jews” (99). The elements of the 1Elie Wiesel has famously argued that “the Holocaust as Literary Inspiration” is a contradiction in terms (7). 1 fantastic are disturbingly commensurate with the degree of unbelievability of lived historical experience. “The Tumblers” imagines a series of events and a community that emphasizes the impossibility of recreation. The turn to fantasy in Englander’s work, and how it illuminates the absurdity of historical trauma, presents the interconnection between genre, history, and aesthetics that is characteristic of third-generation Jewish American writing. In this interrelationship, the commensurability of a non-rational or fantastic literary mode as an apt approach to fictionalizing the history of an “event at the limits” (3) as Saul Friedlander famously declared—at the limits of comprehensibility and representation—results in the “delight and disturbance” of enchantment (Enchantment 5). I begin this study with the short stories of Bernard Malamud published in the 1950s, which I consider an early precursor to the contemporary trend, before I turn to the fiction of Michael Chabon, Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Nathan Englander, as well as a film by the Coen brothers. These writers draw on the fantastic to make commensurate otherwise incommensurate historical experiences—for Malamud, it is the experience of American post-war Jews and European Jews; for Krauss, it is the experience of Holocaust survivors and third- generation Jews across the diaspora. As I use the term throughout my project, enchantment refers to the strange commensurability of the fantasy mode of storytelling and historical representation that “delights and disturbs” as it defamiliarizes specific historical narratives and larger questions of historiography (Enchantment 5). That is, these works play with fantastic and fantasy tropes to reframe particular historical events alongside larger questions of historical interpolation. For example, the question, how do we know what we think we know about Holocaust history? is central to the works that are specifically entangled with the Holocaust. Although film critics argue that the Coen brothers’ film A Serious Man (2009) does not engage 2 in any way with the Holocaust—whether directly or indirectly—my reading of the film shows that it does engage with the Holocaust indirectly; the film deepens

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