Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (review)

184 SHOFAR Fall 1996 Vol. 15, No. 1 a good and very readable introduction to an imponant philosopher who was known as the Jewish Socrates. Manfred Kuehn Depanment of Philosophy Purdue University Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History, by Michael Andre Bernstein. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1994. 181 pp. $22.00. Michael Andre Bernstein bases his provocative study of the reception of the Holocaust on an uncommon constellation of books. Aharon Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939, Roben Musil's The Man Without Qualities, and Marcel Proust's A fa recherche du temps ppdu are the test cases against which he examines our way of narrativizing history. Bernstein acknowledges that the historical stakes raised by each of these novels vary greatly, but he argues that the three works are equally valuable as examples of how "narrative conventions" have the potential to both limit and expand "historical understanding" (p. 118). The "kinds of stories we tell ourselves and one another," Bernstein argues, "are a central ponion, perhaps even the core, of who we are ..." (p. 2). In Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History, Bernstein is concerned with three key narrative conventions, which he calls foreshadowing , backshadowing, and sideshadowing. The first two terms represent narrative techniques that suppon apocalyptic readings of history. Foreshadowed events are presented as though they were predestined, "pre-ordained," and are seen to be the "harbinger[s] of an already determined future" (pp. 1-2). Novelists and historians employ such interpretations of history, Bernstein argues, because the reward of "fitting even catastrophic events into a coherent global schema is the pleasure of comprehension, the satisfaction of the human urge to make sense out of every occurrence, no matter how terrible" (p. 13). The inappropriateness of such readings of the Holocaust is highlighted for Bernstein by the fact that the "idea of history as a linear unfolding from darkness toward light" is rooted, not in Jewish thought, but in narratives devised by the early Church fathers to explain the "'progression from Judaism to Christianity'" (p.3). Backshadowing-a technique Bernstein finds ubiquitous inAppelfeld's fiction-represents the use of "shared knowledge of the outcome of a series of events ... to judge the panicipants in those events as though Book Reviews 185 tbey too sbould bave known wbat was to come" (p. 16). Bernstein points to the ever-present ironic effect created in Badenbeim 1939 by the juxtaposition of marionette-like characters, who exhibit a "clearly absurd optimism" (p. 59), with our knowledge of these characters' fonhcoming doom. Bernstein contrasts Appelfeld'scomplacent characters with the historical context of post-Anschluss Austria, where Jews strove, in great numbers and at great personal cost, to emigrate. But Bernstein's point is not merely to counter Appelfeld's image of the "meaninglessness ofJewish life in Aryan Europe" with his own interpretation of events (p. 62). He insists on the necessity of narratives that depict a "present tense with multiple, and mutuaUy exclusive, possibilities for what is to come" (p. 1). Such narratives do not cast characters as doomed pawns in an inevitable scheme, nor do they use our knowledge to retrospectively judge the actors in a historical drama. It is this attention to "unfulfiUed or unrealized possibilities of the past" that Bernstein dubs sideshadowing (p. 3), characterizing this narrative strategy as an effon on the pan of the story teUer to present "the immediate reality of an individual . . . on its own terms without the radical simplification of alternatives that characterizes a purely retrospective judgement" (p. 40). In such narratives, human freedom and personal choice are not overshadowed by a "closed universe" supponed by a "unidirectional" view of history (pp. 2-3). Bernstein views !be Man Without Qualities and Ii la. recherche du tempsperdu as exemplary narratives that do not submit their protagonists to the logic of historical inevitability, but confront instead undecidability, the unpredictability of daily life and its character as a kind of "'random walk'" (p. 99). Bernstein quotes from a passage from Musil's unfinished magnum opus that points to the "multiple, contradictory possibilities" (p. 103) inherent in individual experience: "The course of history was therefore not that of a billiard-ball, which, once it had been hit, ran along a definite course; on the...