After Representation?: The Holocaust, Literature, and Culture

8: The Holocaust and the Economy of Memory, from Bellow to Morrison

137 8 The Holocaust and the Economy of Memory, from Bellow to Morrison (The Technique of Figurative Allegory) R. CLIFTON SPARGO “ In this century, so agonizing to the Jews,” wrote Saul Bellow in his introduction to the  volume Great Jewish Short Stories, many people thought it wrong to insist as he did “on maintaining the distinction between public relations and art.” Defending his preference for stories by a young Philip Roth, several of which treated Jews unpleasantly, over documentary work such as Leon Uris’s  best seller Exodus, Bellow briefly considered whether “survivors of Hitler’s terror in Europe and Israel” might deserve only good publicity from writers, before rejecting the notion on literary grounds. “In literature we cannot accept a political standard ,” Bellow maintained. “We can only have a literary one.” This reference to the Holocaust in , two years after the Eichmann trial had significantly promoted public consciousness of the event in the United States, intrigues me for the way it brings Bellow to the verge of political commitment, only to find him unwilling to account for literature by its obvious public effects. Admiring instead the wit and irreverence of Jewish realism, Bellow intimates (if he does not fully rationalize) a mode of historical consciousness attuned to a writer’s immediate means and limited conditions, in which historical event gets filtered through techniques of indirection , deflection, subtlety, irony, or ellipsis. Indeed, as Bellow speaks abstractly of a century that proved agonizing for Jews, his language anticipates modes of covert allusion to genocidal history voiced by his own characters, as when Herzog, title character of the best-selling  novel, fires back at his (Christian) therapist for admiring Herzog’s wife’s conversion to Christianity, “From a Jewish standpoint , you know, this hasn’t been one of your best periods.” For all its off-handed indirection, a statement such as Herzog’s is surprisingly efficient. Even as the remark seems to emerge from unconscious resentments , what Herzog can’t quite say obtains a moral charge. The direct version of the statement (“To admire Christianity in the late twentieth century is to be an apologist for the Holocaust”) would give itself away as rationally absurd: whereas Christian antisemitism provided the background and even much of the cultural foundation for racial antisemitism and Nazi ideology, it cannot be interpreted as precipitating the Holocaust. By avoiding such crude reductionism , Herzog’s statement elicits instead a metaphoric charge, one predicated on the rhetorical structure of omission. What he doesn’t say, “Christians perpetrated the Holocaust,” lends itself instead to the moral claim that “Christians are responsible for the Holocaust,” a sentiment that can be sustained insofar as it is not uttered directly, which is to say, insofar as its abiding value is figurative rather than narrowly historical. Of course, there’s another reason Herzog can’t quite speak his mind, and this is simply that his language of accusation cuts against the grain of normative American (in this case, Christian American) self-understanding. Much in the spirit of Jean Améry’s reclamation of resentment as a moral category to be developed via the perspective of victims whose sufferings have not been properly accounted for in history, Herzog reaches for a cultural ground not yet established , to be based on a view of history devoted to what Lawrence L. Langer, articulating the referential structure of survivor testimony, calls “deep memory.” In By Words Alone, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi hypothesizes that lack of direct experience of the genocide imposed an imaginative distance from it on American writers. Bellow, I wish to contend, perceived this limited experiential access to the genocidal event as fundamental to any meaning the Holocaust could have in the United States, and his characters duly reflect this limited condition in their manner of invoking the Nazi genocide, when they speak of it at all. Still, although reluctance to speak directly of the Holocaust may characterize literature written in the United States of a certain era (say, from  through early s, even by some accounts on into the mid-s), we ought nevertheless to strive to apprehend the difference between reluctance to speak of the events and a reticent or oblique mode of doing so. Bellow, in the portrait offered by his biographer James Atlas, was inclined to accuse himself of a reluctance to speak about the Holocaust that was in part culturally determined. “Bellow was troubled,” Atlas says, in a discussion of his novels from the late s, “by...