Thursday, December 20, 2007
Aharon Appelfeld
In his Introduction to The Age of Wonders, Gabriel Josipovici writes that ‘Implicitly, the way this book is written is a condemnation of those authors, Jewish and Gentile, who, in the past few years, have made use of the events of 1940-45 for their own private purposes.’
To turn the concrete facts of Nazi genocide into fiction is to debase them; Appelfeld, by contrast, does not speak of the unspeakable. He demythologizes genocide.
As an argument about fiction and the Holocaust this is persuasive. Writing fiction set in a concentration camp risks both trivializing the historical reality and producing bad art by supplying the false comforts of story and meaning. Although written from the perspective of someone who was there, who suffered, and who was ultimately destroyed by the experience, a realist text like This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen strikes me as the wrong way to write about the Holocaust, in exactly the sense that Josipovici means.
But something Richard Crary wrote in his two reflective posts on Appelfeld (here and here) persuades me that Josipovici is wrong to absolve Appelfeld from an agenda. Richard writes:
I think there is a tendency to think that because the Holocaust did happen, that it or something similarly horrible was inevitable, given the centuries of entrenched European anti-Semitism. I think it could be argued that Appelfeld's fiction, undeniably powerful as much of it is (The Age of Wonders is particularly remarkable), in a sense contributes to this line of thinking. For in his fiction, the lives he depicts are doomed, are they not? We know the Holocaust looms, either a few years away, or perhaps decades. We know that their daily struggles will amount to nothing in the face of such an enormous, monstrous historical inevitability. For in the novels, the Holocaust is inevitable: don't they rely on our knowledge of it?
In this sense I think it could be argued that such works are, implicitly, Zionist fictions. They represent assimilated Jews as doomed by their own folly. European anti-Semitism is omnipresent and its consequences inevitable. And two points can be made about this. Firstly, it is historically untrue. Not all Jews were doomed. James Park Sloan’s fine biography of Jerzy Kosinski tells the remarkable story of how the Kosinski family survived the war years in, of all places, Poland. Kosinksi’s father was smart enough to see what was coming and managed to hide his family before the Nazis came looking for them. Secondly, the idea that Europe is a repository of timeless and virulent anti-Semitism is one of the basic theses of defenders of Israel.
I don’t want to get into an argument about whether or not Appelfeld is a great novelist Let me simply register some small dissatisfaction with The Age of Wonders. The train symbolism and the other intimations of what is to come seem to me less than subtle. The writing also seems to me at times clichéd. That train ‘belching billows of steam’ in Chapter Nine, for instance. Trains always belch in genre fiction; I don’t think John Updike would ever use a lazy verb like that. Or how about
Father kept his literary delusions to which he continued to cling even when everything teetered on the edge of the abyss.
To me, that sentence is full of lazy writing. Of course, this is a translation, so perhaps Appelfeld has been let down by his translator.
The scene in which Stark punches the anti-Semitic guard in the face seems to me against the grain of the book. It reminds me of those comforting scenes in Hollywood movies where bad people unexpectedly get their comeuppance.
We climbed on the train with the feeling that justice, when accompanied by a certain amount of strength, will eventually triumph over stupidity.
This can be read ironically, of course. But that inclusive ‘we’ embraces, and solicits the assent, of more than just the characters, I think. Just as ‘strength’ perhaps has a wider resonance – an intended one, even - in that sphere where Appelfeld is, in Toby Lichtig’s words (TLS, November 30) , “a mensch… a ‘good bloke’.”
To turn the concrete facts of Nazi genocide into fiction is to debase them; Appelfeld, by contrast, does not speak of the unspeakable. He demythologizes genocide.
As an argument about fiction and the Holocaust this is persuasive. Writing fiction set in a concentration camp risks both trivializing the historical reality and producing bad art by supplying the false comforts of story and meaning. Although written from the perspective of someone who was there, who suffered, and who was ultimately destroyed by the experience, a realist text like This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen strikes me as the wrong way to write about the Holocaust, in exactly the sense that Josipovici means.
But something Richard Crary wrote in his two reflective posts on Appelfeld (here and here) persuades me that Josipovici is wrong to absolve Appelfeld from an agenda. Richard writes:
I think there is a tendency to think that because the Holocaust did happen, that it or something similarly horrible was inevitable, given the centuries of entrenched European anti-Semitism. I think it could be argued that Appelfeld's fiction, undeniably powerful as much of it is (The Age of Wonders is particularly remarkable), in a sense contributes to this line of thinking. For in his fiction, the lives he depicts are doomed, are they not? We know the Holocaust looms, either a few years away, or perhaps decades. We know that their daily struggles will amount to nothing in the face of such an enormous, monstrous historical inevitability. For in the novels, the Holocaust is inevitable: don't they rely on our knowledge of it?
In this sense I think it could be argued that such works are, implicitly, Zionist fictions. They represent assimilated Jews as doomed by their own folly. European anti-Semitism is omnipresent and its consequences inevitable. And two points can be made about this. Firstly, it is historically untrue. Not all Jews were doomed. James Park Sloan’s fine biography of Jerzy Kosinski tells the remarkable story of how the Kosinski family survived the war years in, of all places, Poland. Kosinksi’s father was smart enough to see what was coming and managed to hide his family before the Nazis came looking for them. Secondly, the idea that Europe is a repository of timeless and virulent anti-Semitism is one of the basic theses of defenders of Israel.
I don’t want to get into an argument about whether or not Appelfeld is a great novelist Let me simply register some small dissatisfaction with The Age of Wonders. The train symbolism and the other intimations of what is to come seem to me less than subtle. The writing also seems to me at times clichéd. That train ‘belching billows of steam’ in Chapter Nine, for instance. Trains always belch in genre fiction; I don’t think John Updike would ever use a lazy verb like that. Or how about
Father kept his literary delusions to which he continued to cling even when everything teetered on the edge of the abyss.
To me, that sentence is full of lazy writing. Of course, this is a translation, so perhaps Appelfeld has been let down by his translator.
The scene in which Stark punches the anti-Semitic guard in the face seems to me against the grain of the book. It reminds me of those comforting scenes in Hollywood movies where bad people unexpectedly get their comeuppance.
We climbed on the train with the feeling that justice, when accompanied by a certain amount of strength, will eventually triumph over stupidity.
This can be read ironically, of course. But that inclusive ‘we’ embraces, and solicits the assent, of more than just the characters, I think. Just as ‘strength’ perhaps has a wider resonance – an intended one, even - in that sphere where Appelfeld is, in Toby Lichtig’s words (TLS, November 30) , “a mensch… a ‘good bloke’.”
# posted by Ellis : 10:55 AM
