Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past by Amir Eshel (review)

“In the face of anguish, injustice, disease, and death,” Kenneth Burke declared near the start of his 1937 book Attitudes Toward History, adapting a thought from William James, “one adopts policies.” Such policies, he argued, are manifest in literary genres, and Burke especially recommended what he called the “comic frame,” which avoided not only the “euphemism” of “heroic frames” such as epic or tragedy, but also the “cynical debunking” common to elegy, satire, burlesque, and the grotesque — forms of “transcendence downward” that can “paralyze social relationships by discovering too constantly the purely materialistic ingredients in human effort.” The comic frame, he said, strikes a properly “ambivalent” posture, is “charitable” but not “gullible,” attending to both the “moral assets” we express and the baser motives we reveal, respecting the extreme complexity of social structures, and never pretending to have the “last word on human motivation” (106–107).

Burke’s name does not appear in Amir Eshel’s Futurity, nor does the term “comedy.” But Eshel has written a work of Burkean criticism and ethico-political reflection, endorsing a stance of comic ambivalence over and against the deflationary habits of downward transcendence. The particular instances of anguish and injustice that concern him are, in Hayden White’s phrase, the “modernist events” that since 1945 have uprooted peoples, traumatized individuals, and murdered millions. Over the course of seventeen relatively brief chapters (too brief, perhaps; some readers will wonder if the book’s encyclopedic impulses dilute its attention to the specificity of texts), Futurity surveys recent German responses to the Holocaust and World War II (Part I), recent Jewish Israeli responses to the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians and the subsequent conflicts (Part II), and recent Anglophone responses to an anxious post-Cold War, post-9/11 world (Part III). Eshel’s fundamental claim is that, in authors as diverse as Günter Grass, W. G. Sebald, S. Yizhar, Amos Oz, David Grossman, Ian McEwan, J. M. Coetzee, Paul Auster, and Cormac McCarthy — among others — we see an emerging tradition of creative work that uses such historical traumas not merely to debunk meaningful human action and moral assets but to offer charity, “new beginnings,” and what he calls “futurity.”

The comic ambivalence of this tradition exhibits many variations, but the basic dynamic involves, on the one hand, a keen awareness of a harrowing past or immanent destruction, and on the other hand, a sense of what Grossman vividly calls “the strange, baseless, wonderful work of creation,” the human capacity to envision a “world in flux, elastic, full of possibilities — unfrozen” (qtd. 3). Invoking “the most sinister moments of recent modernity,” the authors also “imaginatively redescribe these moments” (10), prompting a “future-oriented self-examination” (103), keeping “both the retrospective and prospective view-points intact,” and doing more than just “measuring the depth of the abyss” (258). In, for instance, Grass, Alexander Kluge, Martin Walser, and several younger German authors, we see an effort to go “beyond confronting, admitting, or evading Nazi crimes” (29), and a struggle to “open new horizons of thinking and feeling about that past,” horizons that may allow us to deal with present-day inhumanities such as torture or racism (37). A comparable impulse runs through works by contemporary Hebrew authors, who use what is “unsaid” in Israeli public discourse — the flight and suffering of Palestinians — to ask readers how they might navigate “the demands of the Zionist national creed and possibly conflicting ethical standards” (103). And in Anglophone fiction since 1989, we find texts that “offer images of . . . horrors as well as metaphors, plots, and symbolic constellations that signal the possibility of a new beginning” (180) — that not only investigate, say, British imperialism (Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans) or an anarchic post-apocalyptic nightmare (McCarthy’s The Road), but that also imagine action, choice, resistance, forgiveness, and hope.

Futurity is a generous and innovative work, with a remarkable breadth of cultural reference. More than most books on post-1945 literature and culture...