The Subject of Holocaust Fiction

Emily Miller Budick

Description

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015

Fictional representations of horrific events run the risk of undercutting efforts to verify historical knowledge and may heighten our ability to respond intellectually and ethically to human experiences of devastation. In this captivating study of the epistemological, psychological, and ethical issues underlying Holocaust fiction, Emily Miller Budick examines the subjective experiences of fantasy, projection, and repression manifested in Holocaust fiction and in the reader's encounter with it. Considering works by Cynthia Ozick, Art Spiegelman, Aharon Appelfeld, Michael Chabon, and others, Budick investigates how the reading subject makes sense of these fictionalized presentations of memory and trauma, victims and victimizers.

Introduction
Prologue: Ghostwriting the Holocaust: The Ghost Writer, The Diary, The Kindly Ones, and Me
Section One: Psychoanalytic Listening and Fictions of the Holocaust
1. Voyeurism, Complicated Mourning, and the Fetish: Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl
2. Forced Confessions: Subject Position, Framing, and the "Art" of Spiegelman's Maus
3. Aryeh Lev Stollman's Far Euphrates: Re-picturing the Pre-Memory Moment
Section Two: Golems, Ghosts, Idols, and Messiahs: Complicated Mourning and the Inter-textual Construction of a Jewish Symptom
4. Bruno Schulz, the Messiah, and Ghost/writing the Past
5. A Jewish History of Blocked Mourning and Love
6. See Under: Mourning
Section Three: Mourning Becomes the Nations: Styron, Schlink, Sebald
7. Blacks, Jews, and Southerners in William Styron's Sophie's Choice
8. (Re)Reading the Holocaust from a German Point of View: Berhard Schlink's The Reader
9. Mourning and Melancholia in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz
Epilogue: Holocaust, Apartheid, and the Slaughter of Animals: J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello and Cora Diamond's "Difficulty of Reality"
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Jewish Studies
• Jewish
• Holocaust
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Jews
• Literature
• The Holocaust
• Holocauste

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 20 mai 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9780253016324
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE SUBJECT OF HOLOCAUST FICTION
JEWISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Alvin H. Rosenfeld, editor
THE SUBJECT OF HOLOCAUST FICTION
Emily Miller Budick
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2015 by Emily Miller Budick
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Budick, E. Miller, author.
The subject of Holocaust fiction / Emily Miller Budick.
pages cm. - (Jewish literature and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01630-0 (pb : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01626-3 (cl : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01632-4 (eb)
1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature. I. Title.
PN56.H55B83 2015+
809.3 9358405318-dc23
2014041962
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
For
Hananel, Micha, Amos, and Noga Almakies Tzeelah, Avital, and Carmel Sharon
You are the joys of your grandparents lives. May you each grow into the person you wish to become; may you continue to include your grandparents in your lives; and may you always be mindful not only of the sadness and tragedies of the Jewish past but also of its triumphs.
This book is also dedicated to the memory of our son
Yochanan Budick
who, had he lived, would certainly have been, like his siblings, nieces, and nephews, a vibrant contributor to the life of the people he so loved.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Prologue: Ghostwriting the Holocaust:
The Ghost Writer, The Diary, The Kindly Ones , and Me
SECTION I . Psychoanalytic Listening and Fictions of the Holocaust
1 Voyeurism, Complicated Mourning, and the Fetish:
Cynthia Ozick s The Shawl
2 Forced Confessions:
Subject Position, Framing, and the Art of Spiegelman s Maus
3 Aryeh Lev Stollman s The Far Euphrates:
Re-Picturing the Pre-Memory Moment
SECTION II . Golems, Ghosts, Idols, and Messiahs:
Complicated Mourning and the Intertextual Construction of a Jewish Symptom
4 Bruno Schulz, the Messiah, and Ghost/writing the Past
5 A Jewish History of Blocked Mourning and Love
6 See Under: Mourning
SECTION III . Mourning Becomes the Nations: Styron, Schlink, Sebald
7 Blacks, Jews, and Southerners in William Styron s Sophie s Choice
8 (Re)Reading the Holocaust from a German Point of View:
Bernhard Schlink s The Reader
9 Mourning and Melancholia in W. G. Sebald s Austerlitz
Epilogue: Holocaust, Apartheid, and the Slaughter of Animals:
J. M. Coetzee s Elizabeth Costello and Cora Diamond s Difficulty of Reality
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
T HIS BOOK HAS been a long time in the writing. Many of the debts I have amassed are now so woven into the fabric of my being, let alone into the book itself, that I can no longer pick them apart. Therefore, to all my friends and family, colleagues and students, with whom I ve entered into conversation on this subject, I am thankful for the enlightenment and illumination I have received. You know who you are.
Some debts are easier to retrieve, such as the journals and collections that have not only given me permission to reprint from the materials that went into writing this book but also helped to shape that material in the first place. Therefore, I want to thank the journal Common Knowledge , which first printed an early version of the Ghost Writer arguments as The Haunted House of Fiction: Ghostwriting the Holocaust, Common Knowledge 5 (1996): 120-35, and Prooftexts , which published Forced Confessions: History, Psychoanalysis, and the Art of Holocaust Fiction; The Case of Art Spiegelman s Maus , Prooftexts 21 (2002): 379-98. My gratitude also goes to Marc Lee Raphael, whose two conferences resulted in Psychoanalysis, Epistemology, and Holocaust Fiction: The Case of Cynthia Ozick s The Shawl , in The Representation of the Holocaust in Literature and Film , ed. Marc Lee Raphael (Williamsburg, VA: College of William and Mary, 2003), 1:1-28, and The Holocaust, Trauma, and the Jewish Fiction of Tzimtzum: Aryeh Lev Stollman s Far Euphrates , in The Representation of the Holocaust in Literature and Film , ed. Marc Lee Raphael (Williamsburg, VA: College of William and Mary, 2007), 2:24-39. Many of the materials that constitute section 2 of the book first appeared in an essay titled Survivor Guilt and Incomplete Mourning: The Symptoms of a Jewish Literary Canon, in Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon: Essays on Literature and Culture in Honor of Ruth. R. Wisse , ed. Justin Cammy, Dara Horn, Alyssa Quint, and Rachel Rubinstein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 517-31.
From February 2012 to November 2012 I was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C. I am grateful to the museum staff and to Phyllis Greenberg Heideman and Richard D. Heideman, who provided the fellowship that paid for my stay there.
I am especially thankful to Rami Aronzon, with whom I coauthored the book that was my introduction into the field of the unconscious mind: Psychotherapy and the Everyday Life . Even though this was a practical book rather than a scholarly book, it provided me with the background in Freud s theories of mind, without which I would never have found a way to read and respond to the Holocaust fictions that I have engaged with here. Rami was a mentor, guide, and, finally, good friend. Without the education I received from him, this book could never have been written.
My interest in Jewish literature is intimately bound up with my children and my grandchildren, who have inherited the history my authors have written about. They are also a part of the project of the future, which certainly will be worthy of the Jewish achievements of the past. Hopefully this future will also secure a safer world for all of us, Jews and non-Jews alike.
My husband, Sandy, needs no words from me to know how much a part of my life s enterprise he is in all of its dimensions. If not for him, I would not have wound up in Israel; would not have understood how intimately my being is wound up in my Jewishness; would not have come to question my commitments and then reestablish them on my own, somewhat different grounds.
Finally, I want to thank my readers Anita Norich and Elizabeth Baer for extremely helpful comments, and, of course the editors at Indiana University Press: Raina Polivka, music, film, and humanities editor; Jenna Whittaker, assistant sponsoring editor; my project editor, Michelle Sybert; and my fabulous copyeditor, Jill R. Hughes, who located and uprooted many embarrassing errors. The text is much cleaner for Jill s skillful scalpel. Series editor Professor Alvin Rosenfeld, who also read and commented on the manuscript, has been a dear colleague and friend throughout.
THE SUBJECT OF HOLOCAUST FICTION
Introduction
I T HAS BEEN many years since Holocaust fiction has had to establish its legitimacy against the charge that a fictional text is either inadequate, inappropriate, or even endangering to the task of representing the Nazi genocide of the Second World War. Yet some of the issues raised in relation to what exactly an artistic representation may be understood to be representing, and at what cost, remain pertinent to our fullest appreciation of the best Holocaust literature. If this body of texts is to become an inseparable part of the literary canon and not just a set of special writings to which we grant a privileged status because of the gravity of the events they record (not to mention their relative historical proximity), then establishing the credentials of these texts on more purely aesthetic and literary grounds becomes imperative. This is not to say that preserving the texts relationship to the events that produced them in the first place is not an equally important goal. The preservation of historical knowledge is an essential objective for any culture. In the case of the Holocaust, as with other fraught historical catastrophes, casting doubt on whether events occurred and dismissing the gravity of their consequences for real human beings and communities are anathema both to the writers of the texts and to the participants in the events that the texts fictionalize. This is equally true, one hopes, for readers. Nonetheless, the preservation of historicity may not be the primary province of literary fictions. Indeed, it may be in the very nature of fiction to trouble the waters of historical validity and veracity. Literary texts, whatever their subjects and ethical goals, function in specifically literary ways. And that might well mean that their narrative procedures clash with their historical aspirations.
In the following pages I argue that Holocaust fiction, no less than great fiction generally, proceeds through the flawed, often faulty subjectivities of its characters. This prominence of the subjectivity of characters (even in dire circumstances, the historical accuracy of which is not up for di