The Jewish American Novel

Chapter Two. The US-American Political System and the Discursive Construction of the Holocaust

32 Chapter Two The US-American Political System and the Discursive Construction of the Holocaust In the following, I discuss four constituent subsystems of the US-American cultural system: the political, the religious, the philosophical, and the literary systems. These four subsystems obviously do not make up the entire US-American cultural polysystem —which also includes, for example, the economic and the legal systems—but they are a selection of subsystems relevant to an understanding of the Jewish American novels studied in the second part of this book. The focus of these chapters will be on the specific repertoires, and their discursive formulations, circulating within the different institutions that make up the subsystems under study. The broad USAmerican cultural system consists of a series of institutions, such as economic, legal, political, academic, literary, philosophical, religious, and media institutions. These institutions are juxtaposed within the cultural polysystem but they can belong to more than one subsystem. The Treasury Department, for example, is both an economic and a political institution (as it is part of the economic as well as the political system); book reviews published in US-American magazines or newspapers (i.e., in media institutions) are located in the literary system, while articles on legislation published in the same media belong to the legal system. This illustrates how, on the institutional level, adjacent subsystems inevitably overlap. Within these institutions, various discourses circulate. As a result, a specific discourse should always be de- fined by two elements: the topic or object of the discourse (e.g., politics) and the institution in which it appears (e.g., the media). The political system, then, is the overarching concept, which comprises those parts of the different institutions in which the discourses about politics circulate. In order to avoid unwieldy formulations such as “discourse about politics (specifically the Holocaust) in the political institutions” this chapter will use a reduced term, “political discourse,” to refer to discourse in the political institutions, though it should be understood that a correct terminology should always include a definition of both the object and the particular institution in which the discourse appears. The object of the discourse will always be obvious, The Political System and the Discursive Construction of the Holocaust 33 however, from the contextual information that is given (e.g. when discussing the political system, terms such as “political discourse,” “academic discourse,” “journalistic discourse” will obviously refer to discourse about politics in these various institutions. Similarly, the object of “academic discourse” in my discussion of the religious system will logically be religion). Although in each of the following chapters I focus on one specific system, I do not discuss these systems in their entirety (as each of these systems could easily be the subject of a book-length study in and of itself); instead, I trace specific elements within these systems that contribute to an understanding of the rise of the Jewish American novel in the literary system, as well as the specific repertoire / discourse used in these novels. For the political system, this is the increasing visibility of the Holocaust; for the religious system, the success of radical theology; and for the philosophical system, the penetration of French existentialism. In each case, these new elements bring about repertoric—sometimes even institutional—changes in the systems under study. One year before Hayden White was to make a similar observation in Metahistory , Jean Pierre Faye argued that “because history is created only by being narrated , a critical view of history can only be accomplished by telling how history, through narrative, is produced” (9). The central event in twentieth-century Jewish history was undoubtedly the destruction of five to six million Jews—two-thirds of the entire Jewish population in Europe—in what later became known as the Holocaust (Hilberg 767; Dawidowicz 403; Novick, Holocaust 334n23). The purpose of this section is obviously not to give a detailed discussion of one of the bleakest episodes in human history; others have sufficiently documented this period. Instead, in this section I focus on the discursive representation—or the lack thereof—in the USA of the Nazi policies and the resulting Judeocide. The influence of the Holocaust on the US-American Jewish community often depended not so much on the historical event as such, but rather on the images it was presented with in media discourse. As James E. Young points out, “both events and their representations are ultimately beholden to the forms, language...