Narrative Constructs and Border Transgressions in Holocaust Literature within the American Context

Michael McKeon states, in his introduction to the anthology Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, that a genre is "a problem solving model on the level of form" (1). One is tempted to "consider each work as an isolated case, a 'trait' in search of a 'type'" (4). This approach suits the novel as form encompassing extremely heterogeneous matter. After production and consumption what remains is, as Alain Robbe-Grillet declares, "the perceived object," a "partial" and "provisional" signification (McKeon 804). Both writer and reader accede to reality via the betraying slippery words. The language they put together, writing and reading, is loaded with personal cultural memory.

When the reality represented in novelistic matrix is as traumatic and uncanny as the Holocaust, then genre has to get adjusted to the sinuous, tricky psyche remembering and attempting to communicate. Trauma blocks for a long while the capacity to reminisce and express. One tells the catastrophic story abiding by the rules of the affected brain and soul of the witness, participant, or perpetrator.

In the case of indirect renditions of history, the extent and depth of documentation stand trial, as much as the capacity to reconstruct it via imagination. Access to the Shoah² may be denied by the tragically incommensurable event, but lack of empiric experience may help. One classical example is offered by the midrash of Lamentations by Rabbi Judah the Prince and Rabbi Yohanan. The first one, although the compiler of the Mishnah and a pre-eminent sage of the period was bested by R. Yohanan, his disciple, and one of the Amorites, the rabbis who succeeded the sages of the Mishnah and whose authority was considered secondary. The paradox is resolved by indicating the distance in time of each from the destruction of the Temple. Rabbi J. the P. lived in the second half of the second century and the beginning of the third, and though not an eye witness to the horrible consequences of the Bar Kochba wars of 132–35, he was close enough to hear accounts of witnesses and to observe the effects of the disaster. R. Y., living one generation later, was not burdened by the same weight of memory. Experience and memory can act as impediments to interpretation and authenticity. Reading and interpreting depend not upon the authenticity of experience, but upon will and imagination: the will to recover meaning from the text and the imagination of exegetical ingenuity, which in turn depend for their success upon time and distance (Mintz 51).

I shall discuss three Holocaust hybrid texts whose constructors represent both cases: Elie Wiesel's novel, Night (French 1958/English 1960), factually rooted in the author's personal experience, as well as two novels: Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl (1989) and Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated (2002), imaginarily roundabout artistic representations of the catastrophic event. Their very unorthodox structures illustrate the difficulty of making the matter of literary genre contain a humanly disruptive occurrence. The uncanny schizoid nature of the Holocaust as Final Solution, meant to exterminate a whole ethnic group by routine bureaucratic and technological efficiency is reflected in the matter of these novels.

Wiesel's cultural and experiential acquisitions infused in his testimonial text include interest in the Talmud, a certain complicated, existentialist Judaism, which mixes Camusian rebellion with mystical faith, and two years of his teenage childhood spent in four Nazi concentration camps (Auschwitz, Buna, Buchenwald, and Gleiwitz). Night is born out of a tormenting doubt concerning the artistic or even scientific possibility for Hurban³ to be described or explained. The "Holocaust defies reference, analogy," he wrote (Wiesel 1968: 26). It is unique in history and irretrievable in documentary writing or fiction. However, ten years after liberation, he meets the challenge. The brief, terse sentences combining factual rendition with poetical lamentation using biblical rhetoric are the product of an effort to capture the flavor of cruelty, suffering, and despair of his Nazi camp experience. Wiesel writes:

(…) everything that has to do with writing is sacred. Since the event itself is testimony, it must be communicated...