After reading, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Tadeusz Borowski, I am provoked by many questions.
What do we do with fictional Representations of the Holocaust? We all remember Theodor Adorno’s dictum, of course: “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” What is the relationship between art and the Holocaust, though? How can fiction morally represent the Holocaust experience?
Inga Clendinnen wrote the essay “Representing the Holocaust: The Case for History” (1998). She argues that fiction, I would add art, has to be involved in rendering the events and the pathos of the Holocaust. She begins by stating that the role of art is “to intensify, to transfigure, and [to] elevate actuality” (3). I feel comfortable with her designation of art’s purpose while recognizing, of course, that she is not being exhaustive in her description of the purpose of fiction. Indeed, fiction often wields a magical power that can enlarge our understanding of human experience. However, when we consider art related to the Holocaust, art no longer possesses the magical power of affect, because, as Clendinnen explains: “[When we] touch the Holocaust . . . the flow is reversed” (3). No longer is art commanding its subject, because the matter of the Holocaust “is so potent in itself that when art seeks to command it, it is art which is rendered vacuous and drained of authority” (3). Therefore the fiction writer has this sobering challenge because now she must, not only adhere to the governance of morality, but she must also create a work of fiction that extends the reader’s imaginative affect. That is to say that a writer like Borowski must write a story that expands the readers’ imaginative experience of the Holocaust.
Every category of fiction seems to have some conventions and I think it’s useful to consider some of the conventions of Holocaust literature, because we will find Borowski is really trying to stay away from those tropes of Holocaust literature his contemporaries would have maintained. Holocaust representations are rife with iconographic and archetypal figures, consisting of the heroic martyr figure or the moral redeemer, for example. Holocaust literature is so loaded with affect and pathos that even the most banal of words is suffused with “mythic potency” as Clendinnen points out. Therefore, words like oven, chimney, train, smoke, hair are “charged with explosive, undifferentiated emotional force: the genie effect” (5). Such infusion of meaning makes it difficult for the writer to create a vivid reality without reducing the experience to cliché. Clendinnen refers to that body of emotion we bring to the Holocaust text as “existing capital” (6). That is to say that we have “a pre-existing array of emotions” that we bring to the Holocaust text. However, when we look at Borowski’s text, we don’t necessarily draw on existing capital; rather we exercise our imagination in a new and extraordinary way (6).
What is different about Borowski: He refuses to sentimentalize the survivor. He’s not alone in doing that; Art Spiegelman doesn’t sentimentalize. Borowski’s rendering of the events of the Holocaust give a scathing account of the all-encompassing evil of humanity, the total depravity of people. This author is not interested in contriving some kind of pathos in his readers. Why does Borowski portray the Jews with such an unsympathetic brush?
In subsequent posts, I will consider how and suggest why Borowski represents the Holocaust the way that he does.
The next part of the novel isn’t due for a while, but it’s good for you to understand what else you will be doing with the novel. This portion of the assignment will take significant time. Be sure to pace yourself.
Our first unit is Starting Out – Beginning and Becoming
Our sub-topics are as follows:
The Past and the Present
Triumphs and Trials
Discovery and Disillusionment
Relationships with Family and Others
Celebrations and Rites of Passage
From the SK curriculum, we can read a description of this unit study:
As we journey on the road of life, we learn about ourselves, others, and the natural and constructed worlds. Childhood and youth lay the foundation for life, for learning and experiencing, for developing personal volition, for shaping identity and sense of self, and for health and well-being. The paths of childhood and youth are not the same for all, however. For some children and youth, it is a time of wonder, imagination, inquiry, discovery,play, experimentation, and innocence; for others, it is a time of neglect, abandonment, abuse, disillusionment, pain, exploitation, and innocence destroyed. Through relationships with the social, natural, and spiritual worlds, children and youth establish their identities among family members, caregivers, friends, peers, and others. Every culture celebrates or recognizes significant developments or rites of passage in children and adolescents; these milestones may be acknowledged formally or informally.Although the roles of, and attitudes about, children and youth have developed over time and varied across cultures,by examining the complex nature of childhood and youth, we have the opportunity to understand how childhood and youth contribute to who we are and who we would like to be.
Watch this YouTube clip of David Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty disappear.
Once the students have seen the illusion, then show them the video explaining how he did it.
Worldview is like the stage. It affects our entire perception of reality. The stage shifted the audience’s viewpoint so they couldn’t see the statue. Discuss.
Personal paradigms: Students complete the following handout. Personal Paradigms
The first unit in social studies 9 is Interactions and Interdependence, in which we “examine the local, indigenous, and global interactions and interdependence of individuals, societies, cultures, and nations.”
Victims of the Holocaust had no opportunity to grieve and mourn for the dead. Prisoners in concentration camps were expected to discard bodies as one would dispose of trash. Denying mourning was another layer of the trauma imposed on the Holocaust victims. Peter and Cordonat have the opportunity to mourn the dead; in fact they are compelled to mourn, and they must take on the collective mourning for all of the prisoners. As a result, their relationship to the dead becomes idolatrous. Peter explains how “[Cordonat’s] words savoured of that senile cult whose hold on us grew in proportion to the dangers that threatened us” (140). He continues: “Our religion, which had never been a cult of the dead, was becoming a cult of the grave” (140). They are consumed with their burial rituals, their adornment of the dead. The memorial must not become merely an object of beauty; it must invite action and memory from its viewers. Peter and Cordonat cannot fetishize the graveyard forever. Their safety in the cult is violently wrenched from them when they discover the “heap of corpses” lying in the crude charnel (142). All at once they see their own futile attempts to preserve the dead: “And it was as though, looking beyond the idealized dead with whom I had hitherto populated my labyrinths, my underground retreats, I had discovered the state of insane desolation to which we are reduced when life is done. Death had become ‘a dead thing,’ no more” (142). The mountain of corpses mock their orderly graves, and he thinks that their dead “[wear] their coffins like a wooden livery” (142). The magnitude of death and trauma cannot be neatly taken care of. It is Huyssen who said:
After we have remembered, gone through facts, mourned for the victims, we will still be haunted by that core of absolute humiliation, degradation, and horror suffered by the victims. . . . No matter how fractured . . . representations of the Holocaust are, ultimately it all comes down to this core: unimaginable, unspeakable, and unpresentable horror” (362).
Peter must concede that despite all of his efforts to memorialize, the horror of the killings will always supersede the memorial.
Horror at the magnitude of corpses requiring burial
Indeed when the trains begin depositing the dead, they no longer acknowledge the singularity of each death; they no longer perform the same rituals for each new burial. Again this points to the limitations inherent in any Holocaust monument. Dying and burying becomes familiar: “Now the coffins no longer showed those once ever-present wooden faces like those of eyeless suits of armour. Now a dead man in his coffin was no longer a human being wrapped in a door” (134). All they know of the dead is their weight. They are not given the space of time to learn who these individuals were. While Gascar accentuates the singularity of the victims, he does not reveal their history, nor the history of any of the victims. How could he give them anything but a token treatment? Michael Bernard-Donals offers this critique:
“Literary and poetic representations tempt us to imagine Jews as individuals in the context of the Holocaust, when in fact the Nazi genocide was horrifyingly precise because such an individuality of personhood was prohibited” (360).
Ideed the Nazis stripped the Jews of any sense of individuality, giving them a tattooed number in place of a name, separating them from family, and ensuring that their professional papers, certificates, legal titles, and so on were all disassociated from them. Gascar retains the veracity of such experience.
Dead Bodies to Bury
Important components of Peter’s burial rituals are the religious icons and symbols embedded in his practices. They provide a parallel to the iconography infusing the text. Gascar brings iconography into the text, not so much to memorialize the dead, but to expose the meaningless attempts at memorialisation. In addition to the Jewish symbols there are many Christian icons recurring in the text. Whenever they receive a dead body, they had to provide a cross with a name and a date (13), although this cross is not mounted on the grave. When they discover the first unburied corpse, Ernst—the pastor—suggests they make a cross of branches to mark its burial spot (141). Ironically when the Germans shot down the young Lyonnais man who was trying to escape, they sent the corpse with a wreath of fir branches tied with a red ribbon and a wooden cross which “bore the inscription ‘fallen’ instead of ‘dead’” (148). Peter felt like they had received the military cross. Yet, Peter is adamant about not allowing the Jewish tombstones into his graveyard. He says: “The thought of those stones horrified us. We did not want to rob the Jews of their steles; that savoured of sacrilege and also of an incipient complicity with the Germans” (149). He refuses to give up the names and dates of the dead for the inscription, the key component of the headstone. Iconography points to the ideological influences of religion that inform the Holocaust.
Wooden crossWreath of fir branches
There are many processions in this text, which are reminiscent of the death ritual, but they occur in so many situations that their sacredness has been stripped from them. Again, Gascar is demonstrating the insurmountable task of remembering the dead. It is too easy to strip the Holocaust victims of meaning when it is portrayed in fiction. We have “a carnival procession” (118) when they line up for soup; the Jewish prisoners are “a procession of tortured victims, a mute delegation about to appeal to God” (117). Then, of course, when they bury the dead they conduct elaborate funeral services. These have been reduced to “a summer excursion” as Peter tells us (150). The funeral processions are all pageantry, especially against the backdrop of processions of people moving from the trains to the crematoria to the graveyard. Gascar is aware that his representation could be reduced to a spectacle, a piece of entertainment. By showcasing the pageantry of the funerals, he is critiquing trivial actions one might take in response to the Holocaust memorial. When we read the novella, Gascar wants us to be sobered as Peter was when he understands his fate: “Making us realize in a flash what a terrible responsibility we had accepted when we dug that hole” (119). We also are given the burden to remember. Gascar is reminding us of the dialogic mode of the memorial that Young called “the reflective space,” in which we engage in the act of remembering.
Perhaps Gascar’s intentions in the text are best said by Peter’s lament: “For nothing makes you feel so impoverished as the death of strangers; dying, they testify to death without yielding anything of their lives that might compensate for the enhanced importance of darkness” (158). In the memorial structure of his text, Gascar attempts to give a space for the unnamed, unrecognized victims of the Holocaust. He necessarily limits the scope of his memorialisation, and he reveals the weaknesses of any Holocaust memorial. Nevertheless, his carefully laid out narrative strategies and rhetorical devices are masterful in conveying the reality of trauma, in portraying the psychological suffering of his narrator. Gascar’s mediation of the historical events produces, above all, a memorialisation to the slaughtered victims of the Holocaust.
Bernard-Donals, Michael. An Introduction to Holocaust Studies. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2006. Print.
Gascar, Pierre. “The Season of the Dead.” When Night Fell: An Anthology of Holocaust Short Stories. Ed. Linda Raphael and Marc Raphael. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1999. 114-59. Print.
Huyssen, Andreas. “Monuments and Holocaust Memory in a Media Age.” A Holocaust Reader: Responses to the Nazi Extermination. Ed. Michael L. Morgan. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. 359-64. Print.
Young, James. E. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1988. Print.
After examining the fairy tale elements, I want to note another representative technique I see in the text–that of cartography. While the natural environment is integral to the narrative, landscapes figure just as prominently. Gascar gives much attention to the layout of the camp and its surrounding area—the forest, the town, the saw-mill, and so on. Gascar uses textual mapping to comment on the political underpinnings of the camp. In the center of the camp are the “cavalry barracks built by the Red Army” (117). He traces “a huge bare space that separated the three large brick-buildings from the whitewashed stables which houses the overflow of [their] column, according to that mode of military occupation that disdains all hierarchy of places—thus identifying it with the bursting of dams, the blind and inexorable progress of disasters” (118). The structural arrangement in this camp is conducive to disaster, just as the ideology bolstering the concentration camp phenomena is opposed to progress. Gascar uses the narrative strategy of mapping to condemn the political and ideological constructs that built Nazi concentration camps.
In addition to constructing natural environments and landscapes, the text contains many fissures. Not only are there dozens and dozens of graves, there are the “illusory tunnels of time” (130); “abysses” (140); and an underground labyrinth (140). These crypts, if you will, are markers of the textual tomb. Peter and Cordonat desire more: “This longing for the depths, unsatisfied by our task of weeding on the surface of the graves, impelled [us] to try and open up a trench” (140). It would seem that Gascar is giving a hermeneutic gesture that we not merely do a surface reading of the text, but that we dig into the memory of those killed in the Holocaust, and keep the events from recurring. While digging the trench, Peter encounters the first hastily buried corpse. The second trench results in the same outcome: a corpse. Perhaps Gascar is confessing his own desire to open up a textual trench, to reach into the depths of the earth to recover the Holocaust dead whose bodies were forgotten.
Treblinka
If we compare Peter’s burial rituals to Gascar’s narrative strategies we can make an assessment of their practices. Peter is meticulous in his burial practices: “We seemed like hollow-eyed gardeners, sitters in the sun, fanatical weeders, busily working over the dead as over some piece of embroidery” (149). It is with the detail and care one would bring to a tedious piece of embroidery that he brings to his work in the graveyard. He dresses up each grave, lining it with fir branches and he symbolically buries the dead facing France (129). The graveyard has strictly set boundaries, which emphasize more than simply physical borders: “The limits of the burial ground, in a word, were those of our future, of our hope” (135). Beyond the graveyard, neither Peter, nor the Jews, has any future, any hope. The novella also has limitations as does any aesthetic representation of the Holocaust. The text will not be able to hold all the dead within its prose, but for the Mom who has lost her child (144) or for the desperate prisoner, Lebovitch, there is a future: they will be remembered for generations through this narrative. Although these are fictional characters, Gascar gives them such singularity that we are reminded of the Holocaust victims as individuals, not merely as a mass group. When Peter says there is no future beyond the graveyard, he emphasizes, in part, the purpose of a memorial. Andreas Huyssen insists that “the inner temporality and the politics of Holocaust memory . . . even where it speaks of the past, must be directed toward the future” (363). No doubt, Gascar is echoing Peter’s concern that “someday [they] might find [themselves] confronted with an overflow of dead bodies which would have to be disposed of in a hasty, slapdash, sacrilegious way” (135). This is the danger: a work of fiction may simply provide a generalized, homogenous portrayal of Holocaust victims. By dealing with the singularity of its victims, Gascar’s memorial has more integrity, for the magnitude of the Holocaust trauma cannot be contained in any one representation. Huyssen declared: “No single monument will ever be able to convey the Holocaust in its entirety” (362). Yet Gascar’s single monument powerfully conveys one piece of the Holocaust experience.
When I read this story, I am awed by the author’s depiction of the forest, this space of discarded Jewish corpses and this projection of nightmarish fears. The forest–and the characters’ interaction with this space–remind me of forests in fairy tales, which has led me to consider the fairy tale and how it works to, then, gather additional insight into this story.
Creepy Forest
In order to keep impending death at the surface of the story and to continue in the dreamscape mode, Gascar borrows some elements from the fairy tale genre. Echoes of fairytales reverberate throughout the text. He gestures toward this intertextuality when Ernst tells Peter that he has read his books by the German writer, Klemens von Brentano (130), a German author of fairytales. In particular, Gascar incorporates the forest motif, a prominent feature in the Brother Grimms’ fairytales. Jack Vipes considers the role of the forest. He explains: “The heroes of the Grimm’s tales customarily drift into the forest, and are rarely the same people when they leave it. The forest provides them with all they need, if they know how to interpret the signs” (73). Often the heroes enter the forest of enchantment and encounter something mythical which transforms them. Consider the forest looming on the edge of that liminal space in which Peter resides and in which he must enter despite the threat it poses to him. Peter comes to the edge of the forest and he says, “But now the forest was opening up in front of me: that forest which hitherto I had known only in imagination, which had existed for me by virtue not of its copious foliage or its stalwart tree-trunks but of its contrasting gloom, the powerful way it shouldered the horizon and above all its secret contribution to the darkness that weighed me down” (126). He projects his fear onto the forest so that it becomes the embodiment of his nightmare. The forest is a threat to Peter because it encroaches on his beloved graveyard, and its allegiance remains dubious. He notes that “the forest in which, only a minute before, spring flowers had awakened childhood memories, now emerged as though from some Hercynian flexure, darker, and denser, more mysterious and more ominous” (122). We know that the forest contains many secrets, especially discarded corpses. Later, we see Lebovitch’s reluctance to go into the forest, for he is unsure if it is a safe place with the Partisans residing there (138); yet it is in this forest where Lebovitch finds protection when he is hunted by the Germans. In the forest Peter comes upon the Jewish graveyard which in many respects is a confrontation with the supernatural, the transcendent.
Jewish graves in a forest
He is “overwhelmed by the symbolism of [the] graves” (128). He notes the broken branch symbol on the tombstones—an indication that the person died young; most of these tombstones were inscribed with a broken branch. Peter considers “the symbolism of these graves” (128). As Vipes said, he must “interpret the signs” (73). He believes that he will hear the dead men’s cries even after death and Ernst insists that they will be “sleeping peacefully in the light” (129). Peter rejects this theology: “That’s just to make us feel at peace” (129). Ernst says, “Don’t torture yourself . . . In any case, neither you nor I is to blame” (129). After leaving the forest, he returns to his “pretext”—that is his tending to the graveyard, which as he says is his “badge of innocence” (129). Nevertheless, in the forest he has encountered death in its rawness, and he is forced out of his delusion that his graveyard adornments somehow soften the reality of death. The fairy tale elements—especially the enchanted forest—of the novella enhance the dreamscape mode which keeps the precipice of death at the edge of the text.
Toadstool
Another feature of the fairy tale is the significance of and the personification assigned to nature. Peter refers to “the lady-bird’s carapace and the red umbrella of the toadstool”which were a part of his childhood spring (121), plants that certainly belong to the world of fairy tale. His description of the pond also resonates with a fairy talesque rendering of nature: “There, the radiance of the sky reflected in the water enfolded us so vividly, lit up both our faces so clearly” (121). Often Peter romanticizes nature, languishing in its idyllic bosom. He recites a taxonomy of flowers, whose symbolism does not go unnoticed; the “dwarf forget-me-nots” are a kind of admonition not to forget, but they are dwarfed, hardly sufficient enough for this task. Peter’s graveyard is just as tenuous, despite the tremendous care he applies to it; it is inadequate for the task of memorializing the dead. While Peter’s illusions of nature lull him into a reverie, it is also the bleakness of nature which abruptly shatters his dream and jars him back into reality. He explains:
Sometimes the sun hid. But we could not stir, for we had fallen out of our dream to such a depth that our task—watering a few clumps of wood-sorrel in a remote corner of Volynia—appeared absurd to the point of unreality, like some Purgatorial penance where the victims, expiating their own guilt or original sin, were forced to draw unending pails of water from a bottomless well, in a green landscape, tending Death like a dwarf tree—just as we were doing here (121).
Peter and his companions attempt to beautify the graveyard to create an aesthetic and lush memorial space for the dead they are forced to bury. At times, like when “the sun hid” they realize the futility of their situation: they cannot redeem the “original sin” of the Nazis. Their perceptions are influenced by their natural environment: clouds, forests, and so on. Zipes, Jack. “The Enchanted Forest of the Brothers Grimm: New Modes of Approaching the Grimms’ Fairy Tales.” Germanic Review 62:2 (1987): 66-73. Web. 12. Dec. 2009.
In my last post I introduced Gascar’s lengthy short story “The Season of the Dead” and I noted how Gascar uses a range of rhetorical devices to mediate the historical events of the Holocaust–the mass genocide gripping a nation and the personal and generational trauma tormenting survivors and their families–and through his text opening up a space for the Holocaust dead to be memorialized. It is a beautiful text, really. I mentioned how he creates a dreamscape mode throughout the story, so that the characters seem only half-conscious, a reasonable response to dealing with the immensity of their trauma. Not only are these characters operating in an illusive dream space, their graveyard recalls the Pastoral. Against this Pastoral, Gascar juxtaposes scenes of murdered babies and dead children–scenes that arouse the sublime.
Gascar’s rhetorical devices include his diction which one would associate with a nature scene from the Pastoral. For example, Peter and Cordonat “linger . . . gazing at [their] surroundings” (121) as though they exist in a time of leisure and beauty. Peter imagines himself as a mythical being found in a painting of the idyllic: “A man sitting beside a clump of anemones, another cutting grass with a scythe; water, and somebody lying flat on his belly drinking, and somebody else with his eyes turned skyward, drawing water in a yellow jug . . . the water was for me and Cordonat” (121). Gascar is revealing Peter’s psychological detachment from the reality of his situation, which emphasizes the dreamscape mode of the text. It also suggests the hallucinating effect dehydration and malnutrition might have on the victims in the concentration camp, causing the delirium that makes him believe he is being offered a jug of water. The text, which is not interested in mimesis, conveys a compelling psychological rendering of the concentration camp experience.
Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire
It is absurd that Peter can imagine his situation as idyllic; yet the artistry of the graveyard is equally bizarre, considering the context of the concentration camp. Gascar foregrounds the artistic quality of the graveyard, emphasizing the purity of its aesthetic makeup. That is to say that it has been fashioned entirely from the natural world and not from human structures and monuments. This distinction is highly important to Peter (and to Gascar). When the Germans have culled the tombstones from the Jewish grave, Peter is adamant that they will not occupy his graveyard. He describes the aesthetic quality of the graveyard: “With its ever green turf, its flowerbeds, its carefully sanded paths edged with small black fir-trees which we had transplanted, with its rustic fence of birch-boughs, against the dark background of the forest verge, our graveyard seemed an ‘idyllic’ place as the Germans put it” (149).
Beautiful Greenspace, perhaps what Peter says
He says that they came out to photograph it and that its fame was “like that which carries crowds to gaze at certain baroque works of art or at others which, devoid of art, are yet prodigies of patience and time” (149). While Peter is wary of the ethical implications of setting up the Jewish stones, he is most insistent on maintaining the purity of the graveyard’s construction. It possesses a sacred quality like the Hebrews brought to the construction of the Ark of the Covenant on which no tool was to be used. Gascar is gesturing to the reader to consider the integrity of his own aesthetic representation of the Holocaust, whose construction offers a beautiful memorial in honour of the dead, a beauty which is always tempered by the horrors contained within its prose.
Gascar recognizes the literary constraints of representing the Holocaust, which causes him to assess narrative strategies and discursive practices. Peter considers the magnitude of suffering experienced by Lebovitch and the Jews:
They took you into a universe which perhaps had always existed behind the solid rampart of the dead, and of which the metaphors of traditional rhetoric only gave you superficial glimpses; where the bread was literally snatched form one’s mouth, where one could not keep body and soul together, where one really was bled white and died like a dog (138).
Metaphor breaks down when it tries to represent the Holocaust. Language which was once full of hyperbole has become a reality for the Jews. Peter demonstrates how words, mere signifiers, are loaded with such power because of Nazi rhetoric that they actually swallow them up in their meaning. Peter explains: “Like novice sorcerers inexpert in the magic of words, we now beheld the essential realities of hell, escaping from the dry husks of their formulae, come crowding toward us and over us: the black death of the plague, the bread of affliction, the pride of a louse” (138). Gascar illuminates how words are subject to cultural meaning; these quaint idioms he quotes contain hellish reality. Certainly, Gascar’s attention to discursive practices is an indictment against Nazi propaganda which uses words to deceive and control, but it also reveals his own reticence at narrating this piece of Holocaust fiction.
In the midst of Peter’s idyllic graveyard, Gascar infuses elements of the sublime as a way to foreground the singularity of death against the backdrop of mass killings. By employing the sublime he retains the veracity of representation. Peter is always aware of the overwhelming horrors unfolding in the camp and at the train docks; yet he mostly pushes these aside and occupies himself with weeding and transplanting. However he can’t always avoid horrific confrontations. When he comes upon the mass grave, these hastily buried corpses pit the extraordinary truth of death against his abstractions of death. Here he confronts the abject:
I was overwhelmed by the sombre horror of it and the truth it revealed—these liquefying muscles, this half-eaten eye, those teeth like a dead sheep’s; death, no longer decked with grasses, no longer ensconced in the coolness of a vault, no longer sepulchred in stone, but sprawling in a bog full of bones, wrapped in a drowned man’s clothes, with its hair caught in the earth (142).
He can’t dress up death here. Gascar provides another subliminal departure from the dreamscape of Peter’s sensibility when he focuses in on the train dock: the German guards toss dead children on to the roofs of the vans. This train scene breaks up the dreamscape again and Peter zeroes in on the singular experience of a woman. He recounts:
High up in the wall of the van, a little to the left in the narrow opening, there was a face; it seemed not living, but painted—painted white, with yellow hair, with a mouth that moved feebly and eyes that did not move at all: the face of a woman whose dead child was lying above her head (145).
This face, this countenance, makes an impression on Peter and he confesses: “Death can never appease this pain; this stream of black grief will flow forever” (145). Peter realizes that the burials, the funerals, all his efforts to honour the dead will never remove the pain, the grief, the memory of a monstrous history. Gascar’s instances of the sublime force Peter, and the reader, to confront the abominable reality of the Holocaust. Just when he lulls Peter back into his dreamscape, he erupts the text with the sublime. Gascar depicts the agonizing experiences of those forced to dig graves, of those forced to bury the dead, of those forced to witness travesty. Through diction and syntax and rhetoric, he creates a dreamscape mode that he, then, disrupts with the sublime. And, it is uncomfortable, but reading about the Holocaust isn’t about being comfortable. It’s about never forgetting.
In my next post, I’m going to discuss the way that Gascar incorporates fairy tale generic conventions into his story.
I have recently reread a number of stories from When Night Fell: An Anthology of Holocaust Short Stories. This collection considers the ethical position of those writing the Holocaust. What captivates me again is the forty-six page story (novella?) called “The Season of the Dead,” by Pierre Gascar. This story serves as a memorial structure, in which the Holocaust dead are given a formal burial ground. Gascar provides a comprehensive description of the narrator, Peter, his methodical construction of the graveyard. Throughout the narrative, Gascar details grave positions, flower arrangements, boundaries, and so on. These excessive descriptions are signposts to the reader, which point out the narrative strategies Gascar employs to construct his textual graveyard. The character Ernst draws the comparison between the literal and the textual graveyard: “I mean that this ancient, traditional burial-ground, close by your own fresh and improvised one, is rather like the upper shelf in a library” (128). Gascar’s novella is a composite of many of the literary conventions one might locate on that library shelf. Indeed, Gascar employs elements from the film framing technique Dreamscape, from the fairy tale, from religious texts. He incorporates the abject and the sublime and he infuses the text with characteristics of Surrealism. Gascar uses very specific rhetorical devices to mediate the historical event in such a way that the dead are always at the surface and the text becomes their textual graveyard.
I have taken three grad courses that were explicitly Holocaust literature courses or dealt significantly with Holocaust literature. We extensively discussed the ethical implications involved in writing about the Holocaust. Indeed, many scholars have considered ethical and historical considerations of representing the Holocaust. In addition, some scholars have considered artistic representations of the Holocaust; however, few have delineated any substantial set of narrative and rhetorical strategies employed by Holocaust writers. They may have identified pervasive modes of narration; yet they have not identified the techniques used to convey these modes. I am not suggesting that there is a formula or a single set of conventions for writing about the Holocaust. What I am suggesting is that the focus of critical inquiry into Holocaust literature has been dominated by the ethics of representing the Holocaust—as important as that is—and has been deficient in considering how the aesthetic work’s construction mediates the historical events. I am interested in how a text, such as Gascar’s “The Season of the Dead, attempts to memorialize the dead primarily on a textual level.
In constructing a memorial site for the dead, Gascar is attentive to features of a memorial. James E. Young explores the function and successes of many Holocaust memorials, explaining that “the raison d’être for Holocaust monuments is ‘to never forget’” (173). This dictum is in direct defiance to the intention of the Final Solution, which would have obliterated Jews from history and memory. Young emphasizes that memorials are not, themselves, the memory; rather, it is in the “reflective space” the memorials occupy and open up that we remember (189). Peter opens up a graveyard in the narrative, which also opens up a textual space for us to remember. Not only does the text contain a physical graveyard, it maintains a graveyard-like atmosphere. That is to say that death is either at the surface or just beneath the surface of the text. Peter exists in a liminal space which creates a feeling of tentativeness throughout the narrative. We are always aware of death’s immanence for any of the individuals in the story. Even at Peter’s commission to const
ruct the graveyard, the N.C.O. says, “There is to be a graveyard here . . . your own” (116). This designation hovers over the text and over all that Peter does. Gascar keeps the temporality of the text right at the precipice of death, which is certainly commensurate with the feelings of those in the concentration camp. He describes the Jewish people, motionless, “driven there by some somnambulism of fear,” caught up in a nightmare from which they cannot awake:
“To Jews . . . going and staying were equally intolerable fates, and they would advance timidly towards the edge of the road or the barbed wire, take one step back and move a little to one side, as though seeking some state intermediary between departure and immobility. They would stand on the verge of imagined flight, and in their thoughts would dig illusory tunnels through time (130).
Gascar attempts to recreate the feeling of the Jews in their state of indecision, when they imagine they have choices. Gascar suggests that the victims escape through acts of the imagination; in other words, they psychologically distance themselves from the reality before them. Gascar’s narrative makes the same kinds of departures from realism in its rendering of the historical event. It gets caught up in a Kafkaesque world with disorientations and surreal distortions.
Peter imagines himself as an ethereal figure in the surreal and bizarre space he is forced to occupy. He explains: “We belonged to another world, we were a team of ghosts returning every morning to a green, peaceful place, we were workers in death’s garden, characters in a long preparatory dream” (120-1). Peter describes his experience as a dream. In his dream world he does not have to assimilate the horrors occurring in his reality. While the entire text has a dream-like quality to it, Gascar shifts between dream spheres. After tending the graveyard for so long Peter relates this impression: “our continual contact with death was beginning to open for us a sort of wicket-gate into its domain” (155). Through the persistent vis-à-vis with death, the text takes on a transcendent quality which resembles a kind of dreamscape one might encounter in a film. The dreamscape technique offers a way for Gascar to mediate the disjointed spaces—the stark and brutal world of the concentration camp and the peaceful and lush world of the graveyard—occupying the narrative. Gascar uses the dreamscape technique to convey Peter’s “reverie” (154). He continually reminds us of the surreal nature of the text with references to “mirages” (122) and illusory images (122). An example of the way in which Gascar emphasizes the dreamscape quality of the text is his metaphorical description of the landscape. He explains that the landscape is “deprived of radiance by the subdued quality of light; but it exuded a kind of stupor. At first, you noticed nothing” (122). In addition to the hazy sky—a result of smoke from the gas chambers?—he is also describing the inassimilable reality of life in the concentration camp. His description parallels with the deprivations imposed by the Nazis in order to stun the prisoners into complicity. Mass killings, hunger, thirst, and cruelty shadowed their understanding of their reality, so that they find themselves in “a kind of stupor.” Peter is caught up in this disorienting reality.
Anemones blowing in a graeyard
Fear shared their lives, and when we walked past with our sentries beside us it was Fear, that tireless companion, that began in a burst of lunatic lucidity, to count the pebbles dropping into the hole in the pavement, trees along the road, or the days dividing that instant from some past event or other—the fête at Tarnopol or Easter 1933, or the day little Chaim passed his exam: some other spring day, dateless day, some distant day that seemed to collect and hold all the happiness in life (123).In part, Gascar creates the dreamscape through purposeful rhetorical strategies, with the underlying intention, always, of memorializing the dead. He gestures toward such rhetoric in the opening of the narrative, when he describes the dead: “Theirs is not the only memory involved; they enter into a seasonal cycle, with an unfamiliar rhythm—ternary perhaps, slow in any case, with widely spaced oscillations and pauses; [emphasis added] they hang for a while nailed to a great wheel, sinking and rising by turns” (114). Indeed his writing contains “an unfamiliar rhythm,” unfamiliar because it is not always conducive to the mood one would experience in a concentration camp. He creates long, multi-phrased sentences with lulling rhythms, as in this abridged sentence: “Sometimes the earth, dried by the early spring sunshine, was blown so high by the wind that the horizon was darkened by a brown cloud, a storm-cloud which would break up into impalpable dust, and under which the sunflowers glowed luminously” (117).Throughout the text he recreates these undulations in syntax, often by using a cumulative sentence structure, its succession of phrase and clauses creating swells that soothe the reader. For example, in describing the phenomenon of fear, he creates this long sentence:
His syntax echoes back to the “oscillations” of memory (114) with its “bursts” and “[drops].” Not only is he attentive to the “oscillations” of memory, he is also conscientious about the “pauses” of memory. He devises such pauses with his single-sentence paragraphs, such as “It was not until much later that somebody died” (119). By isolating the sentence, he gives more weight to its subject—the dead individual. Another example is the sentence, “I did not understand,” again causing the reader to consider the weight of these words. Gascar’s syntactical constructions catch the rhythm of Peter’s moods in his camp experience.
In my next post, I will discuss the sublime and the way that the story borrows from the fairytale genre.
Mr. Lydgate, the new medical doctor in Middlemarch, has been educated at London, Edinburgh, and Paris, where he has been exposed to the leading research and theory in medical science (131). He has deliberately sought a liberal education in his desire to be a fine practitioner. Mr. Brooke, knowing some of Lydgate’s background, states “that he is likely to be first-rate—has studied at Paris, knew Broussais; has ideas, you know—wants to raise the profession” (82). Indeed, Lydgate imagines his future when he will have “trodden out a good clear path for himself, away from the broad road which was quite ready made” (84).
He is loath to continue a medical practice which has become status quo; he presses for new theory and new research which will lead to a more effective medical practice. As such, he dedicates himself to research. The post he accepted at the hospital facilitates his passion for research, gives him “free authority to pursue all comparative investigations which his studies, particularly in Paris, had shown him the importance of” (412). We glimpse his methods of research: “His more pressing business was to look into Louis’ new book on Fever, which he was specially interested in, because he had known Louis in Paris, and had followed many anatomical demonstrations in order to ascertain the specific differences of typhus and typhoid” (149). He, then, reads until very late in the night, “bringing a . . . testing vision of details and relations into this pathological study” (149). Lydgate’s conception of scholarship is in line with that conceived by Newman.
Lydgate privileges the microscope
It is worthwhile noting how Lydgate’s education and scholarship differ from Casaubon’s. Lydgate, like Casaubon, wants to achieve a great work and, like Casaubon, he envisions a totalizing work. We have already established the focus of Casaubon’s work: to unlock the key to all mythologies. Now, we examine the subject of Lydgate’s work. He views “the dark territories of Pathology” to be “a fine America for a spirited young adventurer” (133). Specifically, the scope of his project is “to demonstrate the more intimate relations of living structure, and help to define men’s thought more accurately after the true order. The work had not yet been done, but only prepared for those who knew how to use the preparation. What was the primitive tissue?” (135). Lydgate embraces progression; he views himself as a discoverer (134). He follows the methods of scientific research; he advocates for empirical study. As a result, Lydgate has a great affinity for the microscope: “The use of the lens [would] further his judgment in special cases, would further his thought as an instrument of larger inquiry” (133). Lydgate, consequently, anticipates progression, unlike Casaubon who “[wanders] about the world and [tries] mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and confusing changes” (13). Lydgate wants to construct; Casaubon wants to reinstate.
Lydgate’s ethical attitude regarding his responsibility to scholarship and to society is another divergence from Casaubon’s attitude. Lydgate views himself as a member of a community of scholars, and he views his research to be, not an end project, but a piece of a wider scholarship: “Lydgate was ambitious above all to contribute towards enlarging the scientific, rational basis of his profession” (134). Because he deems the advancement of knowledge to be a collegial task, he values research conducted by those preceding him. The narrator relates: “The more [Lydgate] became interested in special questions of disease . . . the more keenly he felt the need for that fundamental knowledge of structure which just at the beginning of the century had been illuminated by the brief and glorious career of Bichat, who died . . . but . . . left a realm large enough for many heirs” (134). Therefore, we learn that Lydgate looks to those who came before him, but also to those who will come after him. We remember that Casaubon isolates himself from other scholars and that he rejects new theory being published in his day. He is not building on, nor advancing, knowledge; he is pulling all mythologies under one reigning mythology (or at least attempting this project). Lydgate views his own scholarship as one link in a chain of discoveries which are beginning to emerge: “He was ambitious of a wider effect: he was fired with the possibility that he might work out the proof of an anatomical conception and make a link in the chain of discovery” (132). Lydgate views research to be reciprocal: scientists build on one another’s ideas with the shared goal of advancing knowledge. It is obvious that Lydgate has a more progressive approach to scholarship than does Casaubon.
We need to examine the nature and effect of Lydgate’s education under Newman’s model of a liberal education. Newman’s conception of learning includes an interaction with new theories. He explains:
There is no enlargement, unless there be a comparison of ideas one with another, as they come before the mind, and a systematizing of them. We feel our minds to be growing and expanding then, when we not only learn, but refer what we learn to what we know already. It is not the mere addition to our knowledge that is the illumination; but the locomotion, the movement onwards, of that mental centre, to which both what we know, and what we are learning, the accumulating mass of our acquirements, gravitates (135).
Newman’s description of the enlarged mind resonates with Lydgate’s approach to learning, for he intersects what he is learning with what he has already learned. That is to say that he makes room for new knowledge, but does not neglect what has already been established. He becomes fully enthralled in his study of Fever, which “gave him that delightful labor of the imagination which is not mere arbitrariness, but the exercise of disciplined power – combining and constructing with the clearest eye for probabilities and the fullest obedience to knowledge; and then, in yet more energetic alliance with impartial Nature, standing aloof to invent tests by which to try its own work” (149). He is engaging in that vibrant work of enlarging the mind as Newman describes it.
This word cloud captures some of the concepts contained within liberal arts education
Lydgate’s idealism about the good he will do reminds us of Dorothea’s own quixotic notions about her philanthropic acts. It was a deficient education that augmented Dorothea’s idealism and led her into her tragic marriage to Casaubon. We now examine the deficiencies that lead to Lydgate’s tragedy. We learn that Lydgate is “still in the making” and that “there were both virtues and faults capable of shrinking or expanding” (135). The narrator discloses that “[he] is a little spotted with commonness” and that “[his] conceit was of the arrogant sort . . . massive in its claims and benevolently contemptuous” (135-6). Lydgate is confident that his vulnerability is protected by his intelligence and by his experience which taught him to constrain his passion. He feels quite impervious to enticement. However, we know of “the fitful swerving of passion to which he was prone, together with the chivalrous kindness which helped to make him morally lovable” (137). His compassion and sincerity are much like that of Dorothea, and much like Dorothea, if they are not tempered, will lead to tragedy. While Dorothea has Ladislaw who shines light onto her ignorance, Lydgate has not opened himself up for anyone to shed light onto his errors. Mr. Farebrother may have been a candidate for such a position, but his vices and contradictions undermine him; furthermore, Lydgate has not always been forthcoming in speaking to Farebrother about personal matters (671). As a result, Lydgate falls into the vices of Rosamond Vincy whose education has elevated her to a status far above the life she experiences with Lydgate. This fateful union leads to Lydgate’s debt and ultimately to a scandal in which he becomes embroiled.Lydgate is certainly passionate about his scholarly work, but not at the expense of philanthropy. In fact, Lydgate considers “the most perfect interchange between science and art; offering the most direct alliance between social conquest and the social good” (131). Again he notes that his “pursuit of a great idea was to be a twin object with the assiduous practice of his procession” (133). Lydgate imagines that he will make a significant medical breakthrough which will grant him recognition in the scientific community; yet, ultimately, he is motivated by contributing to medical science for the benefit of the patient. He explains: “He meant to be a unit who would make a certain amount of difference towards that spreading change which would one day tell appreciably upon the averages, and in the meantime have pleasure of making an advantageous difference to the viscera of his own patients” (132). His research is not merely theoretical for it leads him to provide his patients with better treatment options.
William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience
Dorothea views the Lydgate scandal as a travesty in which she can exercise her power of influence to bring restoration. Dorothea, the Saint Theresa, who has desired an epic life, has finally the resources of knowledge to be an agent of benevolence. It is in her dealing with Lydgate that we appreciate how much her education has empowered her. She relates that “some of her intensest experience in the last two years had set her mind strongly in opposition to any unfavourable construction of others” (670). Upon considering their responsibility to Lydgate, she contends: “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other? I cannot be indifferent to the troubles of a man who advised me in my trouble, and attended me in my illness” (671). The narrator makes an important observation regarding Dorothea’s speech: “[Her] tone and manner were not more energetic than they had been when she was at the head of her uncle’s table nearly three years before, and her experience since had given her more right to express a decided opinion” (671). Dorothea’s experiences and education merit her passionate assertions regarding social responsibility; that is to say that Dorothea is not merely idealistic. Her education has enlarged her vision so that she considers the implications of intervening on this public matter; yet she maintains that it is her responsibility, regardless. Her longing to do good has a subject: “The ideas of some active good within her reach, ‘haunted her like a passion,’ and another’s need having once come to her as a distinct image, preoccupied her desire with the yearning to give relief” (696). What is also notable is that she ignores “the heeding that she was a very young woman,” meaning that it is not her place to defend or benefit a man caught in a scandal. Having gained subjectivity, she declares: “Nothing could have seemed more irrelevant to Dorothea than insistence on her youth and sex when she was moved to show her human fellowship” (696). This is a significant change from the powerless young woman who attached herself to Casaubon as a means to promote social change and to do good. Now, Dorothea dismisses any such notion that she defer to an older man and she acts on the knowledge and wealth she possesses.
Mariana by Sir John Everett Millais
It is due to Dorothea’s confidence and generosity that Lydgate is restored to the hospital and to the town’s medical community. He notes his transformation on account of Dorothea: “The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character” (697). He gives himself up, as he says, “to the exquisite sense of leaning entirely on a generous sympathy, without any check of proud reserve” (698). His loss of self-confidence begins to be restored on account of Dorothea’s benevolence. Dorothea, on her part, exercises the kind of charity she has longed for, using her money to “make other people’s lives better to them” (700). In this way, she explains that she will achieve a two-fold purpose in her endowment: “The Hospital would be one good; and making your life quite whole and well again would be another” (700). Her contributions to society are less grand than she would have desired for herself; nevertheless, it is clear that she makes a profound impact on many. The Finale tells us that “her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good is partly dependent on unhistoric acts” (766). Dorothea becomes a viable force in her society for social change.
Eliot bookends the novel with the prelude and the finale, which, among other things, articulate the role of Dorothea as a Saint Theresa in her society. The prelude introduces us to the Theresas “who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action’ perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity” (1). In addition, the prelude discloses the failure of society to educate such women, providing them with “no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul” (1). We have established how Dorothea’s flawed education denied her the intellectual resources to do good and we how her relationships with others, especially with Ladislaw, enlarged her vision and intellect so that she could begin to act as an agent of social welfare. Indeed, the finale tells us that “the determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of a young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state” (765). In spite of the hindrances to her growth, Dorothea is helped along the way by her own intellectual pursuits and by those educated men who affirm and challenge her intellect. In the end, Dorothea has a life filled with “beneficent activity which she had not the doubtful pains of discovering and marking out for herself” (763). We also note that she gives Will Ladislaw, newly elected Member of Parliament, her “wifely help” (764). Dorothea’s liberal education furnishes her with the necessary resources to fulfill the life of good will that she so desires. We conclude with the words of Newman: “When the intellect has once been properly trained and formed to have a connected view or grasp of things, it will display its powers with more or less effect according to its particular quality and capacity in the individual” (xviii).
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1872. Toronto: Bantam, 1992. Print.
Newman, Cardinal John Henry. The Idea of a University. New York: Longmans Green. 1907. http://www.newmanreader.org. Web. 27 November 2010.
What do we do with fictional Representations of the Holocaust? We all remember Theodor Adorno’s dictum, of course: “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” What is the relationship between art and the Holocaust, though? How can fiction morally represent the Holocaust experience?
ruct the graveyard, the N.C.O. says, “There is to be a graveyard here . . . your own” (116). This designation hovers over the text and over all that Peter does. Gascar keeps the temporality of the text right at the precipice of death, which is certainly commensurate with the feelings of those in the concentration camp. He describes the Jewish people, motionless, “driven there by some somnambulism of fear,” caught up in a nightmare from which they cannot awake:
tanyadfoster 