Fiction Beyond Secularism

4. Messianic Narrative

chapter 4 Messianic Narrative Fugitive Pieces, a 1996 novel of the Shoah and its intergenerational aftermath by Canadian novelist and poet Anne Michaels, crystallizes the problems of representation and interpretation endemic to fictions of encountered loss in vivid, poetic prose that carries readers across decades, speakers, and continents. In its gathering of fragments, Fugitive Pieces opens itself again and again toward ethical encounters with an unwitnessed past. One notable passage, narrated by Jakob, a child survivor of a Nazi raid whose memoirs constitute Part One of Michaels’s novel, serves as my entry point. Though he never witnesses these events, Jakob imaginatively reconstructs the experiences of concentration camp detainees forced to exhume the mass graves of Jews executed during the Nazi attempt to eliminate not only the Jewish people but also the very evidence of that destruction. Michaels is not herself a Holocaust survivor. In fact, she was born in Canada to émigré parents in 1958. Nor were her parents direct witnesses to or victims of the Nazi genocide. This very distance clarifies the creative project of Michaels’s novel, which devotes itself not only to articulating the lasting devastation the Shoah inflicts on survivors but, more interestingly, to performing the inheritance of the losses of the past by those in later generations and by humanity writ large. Imagining Jakob imagining concentration camp detainees as they imagine the dead, Michaels stages what I call a messianic encounter with the past: Messianic Narrative ❘ 135 When prisoners were forced to dig up the mass graves, the dead entered them through their pores and were carried through their bloodstreams to their brains and hearts. And through their blood into another generation. Their arms were into death up to the elbows, but not only into death— into music, into a memory of the way a husband or son leaned over his dinner, a wife’s expression as she watched her child in the bath; into beliefs, mathematical formulas, dreams. As they felt another man’s and another’s bloodsoaked hair through their fingers, the diggers begged forgiveness . And those lost lives made molecular passage into their hands. How can one man take on the memories of even one other man, let alone five or ten or a thousand or ten thousand; how can they be sanctified each to each? (Michaels 52) As I see it, Jakob’s question (How can we take on the memories of the Other?) poses the central aesthetic problem of Fugitive Pieces, perhaps of reading as such, and, in doing so, presupposes an unspoken , a priori, ethical obligation to perform this potentially impossible task. This presupposition of obligation, without which the call would be hollow—namely, that one must struggle toward the Other of history —is itself messianic. In this passage, the encounter with the past is apocalyptic for the imagined Jewish victims, for Jakob, and for readers of the novel. I am reminded of Benjamin’s prophetic phrase “Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy,” as well as of the quasi-eschatological violence of the past as we “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (Benjamin, “Theses,” thesis 6; italics added). Jakob’s narrative lurches between embodiment and abstraction: he offers at once a profoundly physical description of the encounter and one that shatters the body into disconnected pores, blood, and molecules—material in turn bound to the immaterial registers of dreams, beliefs, and theorems. The biological and “molecular” account of intergenerational inheritance as something of the blood, while ironically close to both Nazi ideology and the Jewish notion of election, on closer inspection privileges the proximity of encounter inscribed within a linear temporality. These uncomfortable proximities, like the tension between Michaels’s sensuous prose and the violence of genocide, reflect a crisis of agency staged by juxtaposing the compulsory exhumation by camp detainees of their murdered 136 ❘ Messianic Narrative coreligionists with the willed encounter staged by Michaels (in the writing of the text) through Jakob himself. Thinking about Michaels’s novel in these terms makes clear that a messianic imagination empowers not only Jakob’s access to the past but Michaels’s composition and the readerly experience as well. By presenting the catastrophe of the Shoah to its readers, Fugitive Pieces participates in the chain of witness, educating its readers about the events of the past. As the dominant trends in Holocaust studies insist, this testimony...