THE BROKEN VOICE The Broken Voice Reading Post-Holocaust Literature ROBERT EAGLESTONE 1 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 4/4/2017, SPi 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Robert Eaglestone 2017 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2017 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2016955972 ISBN 978–0–19–877836–3 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. Acknowledgements I have many acknowledgements. Perhaps foremost I’dliketothankmy colleagues and students in the Holocaust Research Centre at Royal Holloway, primarily Dan Stone whose scholarship and intellectual generosity are nonpareil: I owe him a special debt of gratitude, as I do Barry Langford and the late David Cesarani, who are both present in these pages. I’m also grateful to graduate students past and present—Lia Deromedi, Dan O’Gorman, Deborah Lilley, James Milton, Oliver Paynel Natalie Wood- ward, and to Imogen Dalziel and Simone Gigliotti. My colleagues at Royal Holloway have been a great support, including Tim Armstrong, Andrew Bowie, Douglas Cowie, Máire Davies, Colin Davis, Judith Hawley, Jennifer Neville, Adam Roberts, Laura Shoulder, and Debbie Wheeler among many others. I also want to thank Jenni Adams, Eva Aldea, Gina and Laidon Alexander (although I am aware I haven’t answered some of their penetrating ques- tions), Elleke Boehmer, Lucy Bond, Matthew Boswell, Peter Boxall, Arthur Bradley, Matthew Broadbent, Gert Buelens, Robert Burns, Bryan Cheyette, Pie and Mel Corbett, Jo Cotrell, Stef Craps, Penny Crawford, Holly Crocker, Tommy Crocker, Richard Crownshaw, Jerome De Groot, Sarah Dimmerlow, Brian Docherty, Sam Durant, William and Jadwiga Eagle- stone, Caroline Edwards, Martin Eve, Patrick Finney, Malcolm and Jane Geere, Paul Ging, Simon Glendenning, Geraldine Glennon, Hannah Gruy, Judith Hawley, Nick Hoare, Ann Hobbes, Katy Iddiols, Betty Jay, Jane Kilby, Martin McQuillan, Gail Marshall, Hanna Meretoja, Stephen Morton, Jennifer Neville, Zoe Norridge, Jessica Rapson, Anthony Row- land, Danielle Sands, Jo Sockett, R. Clifton Spargo, Gavin Stewart, Richard Tennant, Sarah Tennant, Paul Thimont, Julian Thomas, Liz Thompson, Sue Vice, Robert Vilain, Lucie Wenigerova, and Angie Wilson. I’d like to thank the library staff at Royal Holloway, University of London, Senate House, the Wiener Library, and the British Library (especially in Humanities 2). At Oxford University Press I’d like to thank Sophie Goldsworthy, Jacqueline Norton, and Eleanor Collins for their support and encouragement, and the other staff at the press. I’d also like to thank Darren Almond for permission to use his Bus Stop (2 Bus Shelters) for the cover of this book. I especially want to thank Brian North for copyediting with painstaking care and excellent judgement. I am also grateful to the anonymous readers of the manuscript for their interventions, which I have attempted to follow. All errors are my own. vi Acknowledgements I am especially grateful for a Research Fellowship from Leverhulme Trust and a grant from the AHRC, as well as sabbatical terms granted me by Royal Holloway. Material was given in lectures at the Imperial War Museum, and at the universities of Cambridge, Cardiff, Ghent, Helsinki, Lancaster, Leeds; at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies at University of London; and at the universities of Manchester, Porto, Ružomberok, St Andrews, Salford, Sheffield, Southampton, Sussex, Turku, York, and Zaragoza, as well as at various MLA and ACLA conven- tions, and I appreciate the discussions that arose on those occasions. Earlier versions of parts of some chapters have appeared elsewhere: aspects of Chapter 1 appear in The Future of Testimony, ed. Jane Kilby and Antony Rowland (London: Routledge, 2014) and of Chapter 4 in After Representation? The Holocaust, Literature, and Culture, ed. R. Clifton Spargo and Robert Ehrenreich (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010). Some ideas from Chapter 2 were aired in ‘Avoiding Evil in Perpetrator Fiction’, Holocaust Studies 17 (2011), 13–26 and from Chapter 5 in ‘“You would not add to my suffering if you knew what I have seen”: Holocaust Testimony and Contemporary African Trauma Literature’, Studies in the Novel 40.1–2 (2008), 72–85. Finally, I would like to thank my partner, Poppy Corbett, and my children, Alex and Isabella Eaglestone, for their love and forbearance: I dedicate this book to them. Contents Introduction: Between Meaning and Truth 1 1. The Public Secret 9 2. Evil 29 3. Stasis 69 4. Disorientalism 95 5. Disorientalism Today 125 6. Post-Holocaust Kitsch 139 7. Conclusion 159 Bibliography 169 Index 183 Introduction Between Meaning and Truth ‘Which writer today is not a writer of the Holocaust?’ asked Imre Kertész, Hungarian survivor and novelist, in his Nobel acceptance lecture. He continued: one ‘does not have to choose the Holocaust as one’s subject to detect the broken voice that has dominated modern European art for decades’.1 The aim of this book is to attend to this broken voice in literature in order to think about the meaning of the Holocaust in the contemporary world. The idea of meaning is not straightforward, nor is its relationship to literature. Hannah Arendt famously wrote that ‘storytelling reveals mean- ing without committing the error of defining it’.2 As with so much in her work, this seemingly simple sentence draws its force from a deep engage- ment with the history of Western thought, and is illuminated by the contrast she develops in her final, incomplete work The Life of the Mind between the idea of meaning and the idea of truth. The Life of the Mind is one in a long line of philosophical attempts, starting with book VI of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which seek to illuminate distinctions between different forms of knowledge. Arendt argues that thinking ‘is not inspired by the quest for truth but the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy . is to interpret meaning on the model of truth’.3 She finds this contrast between meaning and truth in Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, Heidegger, and others. In Kant, centrally, she finds the distinction between Vernunft (reason) and Verstand (intellect, the faculty of cognition) (57): ‘intellect desires to grasp what is given to the senses, but reason wishes to understand its meaning’ (57). Truths are given to the senses, ‘factual truths’, ‘cognition or knowing’ (54), provable or 1 Imre Kertész, ‘Heureka!’ PMLA, 118:3 (2003), 604–14, p. 607. 2 Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 270. 3 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (London: Harcourt, 1978), p. 15. Further page references to this volume are given in parentheses in the text. 2 The Broken Voice disprovable. Truths arise from the world of appearances and are the sort of things scientists seek, which arise from the world of appearances. In the process of the discovery of knowledge, ‘thinking’ is only a means to an end (that is, when someone searching after truth ‘thinks’, it is for the concrete purpose of finding better methods or approaches, or new ways of framing and so understanding evidence). The success of science and the impact of modernity have led us to take this to be the paradigm of all intellectual work, and so to downplay or even ridicule ‘thinking’. In contrast, meaning arises from reason and from speech. Indeed, ‘think- ing beings have an urge to speak, speaking beings have an urge to think’ (99). Arendt argues that the quest for meaning is ‘implicit in the urge to speak’ (99) because meaning originates in the straightforward requirement to make meaningful sentences (these need not be true: ‘a prayer...is a logos, but neither true nor false’ (99)) and grows into the need for people to ‘giveanaccount...ofwhatevertheremaybeormayhaveoccurred’ (100).4 While our desire to know generates a ‘growing treasury’ (62) of facts, our thinking, our desire for meaning leaves nothing tangible (‘and the need to think can therefore never be stilled by the insights of “wise men”’ (62)). This ‘intangibility’ is, of course, another reason to distrust ‘thinking’ in capitalist modernity, or to find it idle or foolish. Meaning and truth have a complex interrelationship. From an Are- ndtian perspective, the core intellectual debates of the last century or so are really about the interactions or confusions of truth and meaning. How- ever, nowhere is this relationship more complex and challenging, I believe, than in thinking about the past and in the discipline of history because these draw on both a positivist ‘quest for truth’ and the intangible thinking activity that Arendt discusses.