Natalie Woodward Department of English Reading Holocaust

1 Natalie Woodward Department of English Reading Holocaust Literature as a Creaturely Poetics PhD Thesis Royal Holloway, University of London 2 Natalie Woodward Reading Holocaust Literature as a Creaturely Poetics DECLARATION OF AUTHORSHIP I, Natalie Woodward, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed __________________________ Date __________________________ ABSTRACT This thesis offers creaturely readings of Holocaust literature, where a creature as defined by Anat Pick is ‘first and foremost a living body – material, temporal, and vulnerable’. I also use the concept of creatureliness to approach animal suffering: a question which many authors have compared to the Holocaust. In Chapter One, I analyse moments in Holocaust testimonies where survivors compare themselves, their situation or their perpetrators to animals. In Chapter Two, I analyse Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel. This novel gestures towards a creaturely poetics as Foer compares human victims of atrocity during the Holocaust with animal suffering and vice-versa. I read it through two models of creatureliness offered by Anat Pick and Eric Santner in order to gauge which model best suits my thesis. In Chapter Three, I move forward using Pick’s model of creatureliness to analyse two novels by J. M. Coetzee: in Disgrace, Coetzee traces a shared sense of vulnerability and affliction between humans and animals in Post-Apartheid South Africa, and in Elizabeth Costello the protagonist directly compares animal cruelty to the Holocaust. In my final chapter, I analyse Eternal Treblinka by Charles Patterson and ‘The Letter Writer’ by Isaac Bashevis Singer as two, contrasting ways by which authors compare our treatment of animals to the Holocaust, and see how well both forms fit with Michael Rothberg’s multidirectional model of memory. This allows me to question whether it is desirable or even possible to apply a multidirectional ethics to all creatures. Overall, this thesis questions how and why creatures are depicted in literatures of atrocity (particularly the Holocaust), and how and why we might choose to read literature through a creaturely prism. 3 Reading Holocaust Literature as a Creaturely Poetics CONTENTS Acknowledgements 4 Introduction 5 Chapter One ‘Man in the crevices and depths of his true nature’: Comparing Humans to Other Animals in Holocaust Testimonies 19 Chapter Two ‘A stage full of stories’: Using Beatrice and Virgil to Compare Two Models of Creatureliness 99 Chapter Three ‘The authority of the suffering body’: Creatureliness in Two Novels by J. M. Coetzee 150 Chapter Four EXploring Creatureliness as a Multidirectional Ethics 214 Conclusion 275 BiBliography 285 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS So many thanks to the following people, without whose help and support I would not have been able to complete this thesis: to my family (especially my dad, who encouraged me to do a PhD from the beginning, mum and auntie); to James Dowthwaite for reading through early chapter drafts and giving me confidence and belief in my work; to the team at The Brilliant Club for employing me to design and teach a course on Holocaust Literature to Key Stages 3, 4 and 5, an exercise which also helped to bring clarity and focus to my thesis; and finally to my two supervisors, Robert Eaglestone and Adam Roberts, but especially Bob for our regular meetings, when he offered advice, positive criticism and encouragement, all of which helped me to build and shape my ideas into the following thesis. 5 Introduction In his Holocaust testimony, If This is a Man, Primo Levi describes his interview with Dr Pannwitz, who tests Levi on his knowledge of chemistry. Levi focuses on the look which passes between them: that look was not one between two men; and if I had known how completely to explain the nature of that look, which came as if across the glass window of an aquarium between two beings who live in different worlds, I would also have explained the essence of the great insanity of the Third Germany.1 Despite being the same species and, for the purposes of the interview, sharing the same language as the Nazi doctor, Pannwitz regards Levi as separate from the human race. The closest thing of this world to which Levi can compare it is the look between that of a man and a fish in an aquarium: separated not only by species but also by medium. The fish is scaled, cold-blooded, exists out of air and – in this case – is taken out of its natural habitat to be scrutinised under the voyeuristic gaze of humans. Levi believes that the look may be metonymic for the ‘great insanity of the Third Reich’, as a system which dehumanised Jews and, as such, allowed perpetrators to murder millions of humans whilst countless more bystanders allowed the atrocity to continue. Many activists for animal rights and authors in Animal Studies have taken a comparison such as this and turned it on its head to argue that, if humans were treated like animals during the Holocaust, it stands to reason that animals are treated like Holocaust victims. Authors who have considered this view in philosophy, literary criticism or works of 1 Primo Levi, If This is a Man and The Truce, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 2009), pp.111-112. 6 fiction include, but are not limited to, Jacques Derrida, Charles Patterson, Karen Davis, J. M. Coetzee and Isaac Bashevis Singer. In most cases, the authors are aware that such a comparison is cause for ethical concern. In Elizabeth Costello, for example, the protagonist gives a lecture arguing that factory farming is comparable to the Holocaust and receives a letter from an audience member who argues that her comparison is intolerable.2 Similarly, in ‘The Holocaust and the Henmaid’s Tale’, Karen Davis prefaces her comparison between the Holocaust and animal cruelty with an extended discussion on the nature of metaphors: ‘when the oppression of one group is used metaphorically to illuminate the oppression of another group, justice requires that the oppression that forms the basis of the comparison be comprehended in its own right’.3 She understands that the comparison has been criticised, but argues on a logical plane that it is only right to consider both sides of a metaphor, as otherwise the function of a metaphor is intrinsically flawed. To apply this line of thought to Levi’s comparison between himself and a creature at an aquarium is to implicate the human race in a level of ‘insanity’ comparable to that of the Third Reich. By this logic, the Third Reich (rather than the look shared between the doctor and Levi) may even become metaphor for the ‘insanity’ of the human species who kill animals for food, pay to see them in an aquarium, or turn a blind eye to the practices of factory farming. It does not take long to follow this logic to the conclusion that non-human and human animals exist on the same ethical plane and, as such, must be given equal rights. It is easy both to see how this concept causes offence, and how it might be ridiculed. For example, Adam Roberts considers the comparison between animal cruelty and the 2 J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (London: Vintage, 2003), p.94. This will be abbreviated to EC within the text and all subsequent references are to this edition. 3 Karen Davis, ‘The Holocaust and the Henmaid’s Tale’ (New York: Lantern Books, 2005), p.4. 7 Holocaust in his novel Bête, which is based on the idea that animals should be given equivalent rights to humans. Although Roberts speculates some positive outcomes of this ethical turn, there are numerous other examples where situations descend into a farcical dystopia, such as when a human and his dog win a court case to be allowed to engage in a sexual relationship.4 With this example in mind, an argument for ‘insanity’ can be made on both sides of the debate. An effective text to help unpick the intricacies of this debate is one which I shall analyse more thoroughly in Chapter Three: Elizabeth Costello. In Coetzee’s novel, Elizabeth Costello understands that a comparison between the Holocaust and animal cruelty polarises people and stops them from engaging with the seed of an idea which was put forward initially: be that a debate on the nature of metaphor, concern for animal welfare, or a desire to reapproach the Holocaust from a new angle. Costello feels that she is implicated in a genocidal species and cannot understand how humans can be so loving and yet so cruel, and her family cannot understand why she engages with animal questions on such a personal level. The result is an impasse reached by both, and it is difficult to see how the debate can progress on such divisive grounds. Yet, in Elizabeth Costello Coetzee uses his fictional space to allow both the debate and the implications of this debate to play out. The novel is first and foremost a work of fiction and, as such, its implications in ethico-political fields should be read through that prism. More so than philosophical treatises, Elizabeth Costello approaches the question of the animal, and especially the comparison between animal cruelty and the Holocaust, without the same risk of polarisation faced by Costello herself. As Anat Pick recognises in her analysis of ‘The Lives of Animals’ (the novella 4 Adam Roberts, Bête (London: Goliancz, 2014), pp.44-45. 8 embedded in Elizabeth Costello), it is ‘not just a confounding text, but a text about the state of being confounded’.5 In other words, the debate for whether or not our treatment of animals is comparable to the Holocaust is less of a focus of Coetzee’s text than the literary presentation of a character who is moved by this belief.

Load more