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97 The Escapist: Fantasy, Folklore, and the Pleasures of the Comic Book in Recent Jewish American Holocaust Fiction Lee Behlman Jewish American writers addressing the Holocaust in recent fiction have encountered a daunting set of moral and aesthetic difficulties. Among these are the seemingly unbridgeable historical divide between a relatively comfortable American Jewish present and the dark European past and the inadequacy of any attempt, fictive or not, to capture the scope and intensity of such a massive collective experience. Recent fiction by young writers shows that these difficulties have become exacerbated by time. With this widening cultural and historical gap, and the loss of many witnesses to the Holocaust, has come a loss in direct access to the experience of the Holocaust and its effects. One major response to the problem of representation by young American writers has been the use of fantasy, folklore, and magical-realist devices.1 The first section of this essay describes how in their first books two of these writers, Nathan Englander and Jonathan Safran Foer, make creative use of these devices in order to both thematize and manage the issue of their own distance from the Holocaust. A second section discusses how Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) not only makes use of fantasy but also produces a more direct argument about its value and relevance for contemporary Holocaust-themed fiction. Kavalier & Clay offers a notably bold and provocative assessment of the problem of representing the Holocaust. Though the novel fits squarely within a tradition of realistic narrative—specifically, the Jewish American immigrant novel tradition that combines blunt social critique with a narrative describing a young man’s 98 lee beHlMan economic struggle and advancement—at the same time, it thoughtfully explores the power and possibilities of a particular form of nonrealist art: the superhero comic book. With superhero comic books, Chabon presents a form of fantasy that resolutely avoids the real, for it seeks to resolve history either by overcoming it through neat, miraculous reversals or by escaping its terms completely. Lawrence Langer has ably described the moral and aesthetic difficulties all writers have faced in addressing the Holocaust in fiction: “When the Holocaust is the theme, history imposes limitations on the supposed flexibility of artistic license. We are confronted by the perplexing challenge of the reversal of normal creative procedure: instead of Holocaust fictions liberating the facts and expanding the range of their implications, Holocaust facts enclose the fictions, drawing the reader into an ever-narrower area of association.”2 Holocaust fiction is restricted aesthetically, in this formulation, by the moral privilege that must be accorded to historical fact. “Literature,” Langer goes on to write, “generalizes human experience, while the events of atrocity we call the Holocaust insist on their singularity.”3 Sue Vice has warned of a further problem that accrues to much of Holocaust fiction: by its very nature, she notes, much of mainstream fiction seeks resolution, and with resolution may come sentimentality and a false redemption .4 As an alternative, Vice calls for a kind of fiction that, like much documentary testimony, “is riven with a more fitting linguistic and narrative self-doubt” (5-6). This fiction will be harsher and more ugly on the surface, and will include “crude narration, irony, black humour, appropriation, sensationalism, even characters who mouth anti-semitic slogans” (9). This anti-aesthetic of “disruption and unease” would ostensibly disturb the easy comforts of typical realist fiction and its readers (160). Vice associates her model with Bakhtinian dialogism, but in her hands Bakhtin’s always provisional, rather loose set of descriptive terms becomes a more rigidly enforced set of aesthetic precepts, characteristic of various modernist and postmodern formalisms, perhaps most appositely the “shock” theater tactics of Artaud and Brecht. Although Vice could better define the limitations of her own aesthetic model, it still provides a very helpful guide to understanding recent trends in American fiction on the Holocaust, particularly works by young Jewish American writers. Some of the most striking work by these writers does indeed privilege “disruption and unease” and features endings that avoid easy closure. What is particularly important about these recent works’ practice of “dis-ease” is their use of Ashkenazi Jewish folklore and the fantastic in conjunction with details of the brute reality of genocide. The reader’s sense of shock or surprise in these works derives from the apparent clash between the familiar characters, conventions , and storylines of Yiddish folklore and the dreadful events that would destroy...

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