Michael Chabon, Howard Jacobson, and Post-Holocaust Fiction

Attention to the role that memory can play in reconstructing the past has been a notable feature of certain strands of historiography over the last twenty years or so. Recollections of personal experience—especially when such experience has been marked by cataclysmic events (wars, revolutions, genocides)—have been treated not just as a valid part of the historical record but also as a source of meaning and a guarantor of authenticity. Such yoking of memory and history has attracted suspicion. Kerwin Lee Klein, for example, has discerned in this kind of historiography an undeclared nostalgia for essentialist conceptions of identity and a covert desire to reenchant the world through appeals either to psychoanalytic concepts of mourning and working through or to postmodern appeals to the sublime. As is well-known, memory plays an important role in attempts to come to terms with the Holocaust in the accounts of survivors, memorial sites, artistic representations, and historical works. For Klein, memory often (perhaps typically?) functions as the expression of trauma in such accounts: memory is conceived as a “return of the repressed” because it is believed that “our epoch has been uniquely structured by trauma” (138). Memory is seen to be a source of truth because it uncovers and engages with transformative events. For Klein, this view of memory depends on an untenable theological and/or Hegelian horizon of meanings, which attempts “to re-enchant our relation with the world and pour presence back into the past”; memory, he concludes, “come[s] to the fore in an age of historiographic crisis precisely because it figures as a therapeutic alternative to historical discourse” (145).

Klein has a certain kind of historiography in his sights. He is not discussing imaginative literature, which is an altogether different kind of discourse, but is objecting to the implicit assumption in the historiography he is attacking that the twentieth century is best understood in terms of trauma and that, as a result, memory is a better guide to it than history. This line of argument is relevant to contemporary fiction, much of which deals with events that are perceived to be traumatic, for example (to take just a few obvious instances), the Holocaust, the Second World War, the Vietnam War, the legacies of colonialism and imperialism, the attack on the Twin Towers, and the London bombings of 2005. How (if at all) can such events and histories be comprehended? Furthermore, assuming that they don’t completely exceed our capacity to understand, how are they to be depicted? Discussions of the Holocaust generally center on the question of representation, some arguing that it is unimaginable and therefore beyond representation, others maintaining that it must be returned to and explored in writing and thought. Gillian Rose argues that those who insist on the Holocaust’s “non-representability” simply “mystify something we dare not understand” (43) and implicitly (if sometimes unintentionally) deny that there may be fundamental connections between those who perpetrated it and those who react to it with horror.¹ Placed outside the realm of the human (positioned as “evil” and thus as “other”), the Holocaust becomes the exception, that which cannot be addressed because it is so complete an aberration. Jacques Rancière suggests that this view is typically articulated in terms of an inflated discourse that not only grants an elevated status to ineffability but also acts as a prohibition that prevents the Holocaust from being thought and discussed. For Rancière, the Holocaust is not unrepresentable but rather posits “problems of relative unrepresentability, of adaptation of the means and the ends of representation” (qtd. in Didi-Huberman 157).

This debate goes to the heart of the issues I want to explore in this article, namely how some contemporary novelists are preoccupied with the ways in which identity is affected by the ongoing presence of the past in the lives of those who did not experience but are nonetheless profoundly affected by certain kinds of events. Put another way, what are the consequences for those who come after, those who are aware of a past that comes to them as...