Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction

Notes

Notes 1. INTRODUCTION 1. Quo. in Claudia Dreifus, "Art Spiegelman," The Progressive 53 (1989),34. 2. "Art Spiegelman: The Road to Maus," exhibit, Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, February-April 1993. The museum brochure distributed at the exhibit explicitly echoes Spiegelman's insistence that the Maus sequence is not "in any sense a fictionalized account, despite the artistic liberties taken with both text and illustrations...." 3. For a discussion of the role of the listener in Holocaust survivor testimony, see Dori Laub, "Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening," Testimony, pp. 57-74. 4. While accepting Lanzmann's assertion that the "truth kills the possibility of fiction," in her discussion of Shoah Shoshana Felman explains that "the truth does not kill the possibility of art" (206). 5. According to Lanzmann, "The length of the film is the length of the pensee, ofthe thinking" (quo. in Gussow CI5). 6. "Resurrecting Horror: The Man behind Shoah," Interview with Deborah Jerome The Record 25 October 1985. 7. David Hirsch ably articulates the dangerous potential of certain trends in postmodernism in The Deconstruction of Literature: Criticism after Auschwitz. See also Friedlander's Probing the Limits ofRepresentation . 8. It is interesting to note that Thomas Keneally similarly protested the categorization of his novel, Schindler's List, as fiction. Simon & Schuster categorizes Keneally's book as fiction, describing it as "a factual account done with fictional techniques" or a "non-fiction novel," according to Sarah Lyall, "Book Notes," New York Times 9 March 1994; thus the novel remained on the Times fiction list. 227 228 Notes to Chapter 1 9. The controversy regarding the autobiographical claims of Kosinski 's novel reopened discussion ofthe novel's aesthetic merits, its ethical import, and its legitimacy as Holocaust representation. For an overview on this controversy, see James Park Sloan, "Kosinski's War." 10. Personal interview. 11. For discussion of the role of the lost childhood in Wartime Lies, see Naomi Sokoloff's excellent treatment. 12. Craig Barclay notes,that the ego's self-schema "functions to provide consistency between one's life as lived and the abbreviated story told at any time" (83). See also William F. Brewer, "What is autobiographical memory?" 13. Dennis B. Klein, "History versus Fiction," Dimensions: A Journal ofHolocaust Studies 8 (1994)1:2. 14. The phrase is Yeats's, used in this context by Terrence Des Pres ("The Dreaming Back"). 15. "For Some Measure of Humility," Shma 5/100 (1975) 314. 16. See, for example, Saul Friedlander, Probing the Limits ofRepresentation : Nazism and the "Final Solution" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 17. The Exile ofthe Word, published originally as L'Exil de la parole. 18. For discussion of Nazi-Deutsch, see also Nachman Blumenthal , "On the Nazi Vocabulary"; Lucy Davidowicz, The War Against the Jews 1933-45; and Shaul Esh, ''Words and their Meanings: Twentyfive Examples of Nazi Idiom." 19. Ann Mason has explored this "problem of symbolism"-that is, "the way in which Nazism misused the symbolic mode" (69). 20. See, for example, Louis O. Mink, "Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument," and Hayden White, The Content of the Form, 1-57. Alvin Rosenfeld's analysis of Hugh Trevor-Roper's reconstruction of Hitler's last days-a reconstruction that, while aiming at factuality and objectivity, would "both dampen and excite a new Hitler myth" (Imagining Hitler 20)-provides a good case in point. Rosenfeld teases out the mythopoeiaic, religious, figurative language embedded in Trevor-Roper's and seized upon by Trevor-Roper's successors. 21. See also Eric Satner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany, especially his discussion of Paul de Man, pp.13-30. 22. For a cogent critique ofthe tendency to "definel] science as the adversary or antithesis of rhetoric ... conjoined with a defense of a 'plain style' that attempts or pretends to be entirely transparent to its object," see Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism, pp.15-44. 23. Vidal Naquet makes a similar point in Assassins of Memory: Notes to Chapter 1 229 "Between memory and history, there can be tension and even opposition . But a history ofthe Nazi crimes which did not integrate memoryor rather, diverse memories-and which failed to account for the transformation of memories would be a poor history, indeed" (xviii). 24. For a discussion of midrash, see David Stern, Parable in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature, and Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading ofMidrash. 25. For...