The Subject of Holocaust Fiction

Emily Miller Budick

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780253016324
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia judía

Fictional representations of horrific events run the risk of undercutting efforts to verify historical knowledge and may heighten our ability to respond intellectually and ethically to human experiences of devastation. In this captivating study of the epistemological, psychological, and ethical issues underlying Holocaust fiction, Emily Miller Budick examines the subjective experiences of fantasy, projection, and repression manifested in Holocaust fiction and in the reader's encounter with it. Considering works by Cynthia Ozick, Art Spiegelman, Aharon Appelfeld, Michael Chabon, and others, Budick investigates how the reading subject makes sense of these fictionalized presentations of memory and trauma, victims and victimizers.

SECTION I

PSYCHOANALYTIC LISTENING AND FICTIONS OF THE HOLOCAUST

AS IS PROBABLY clear by now, I am going to read Holocaust fictions psychoanalytically, as expressing and exposing unconscious positions on the parts of texts and readers alike. In this section, therefore, I “listen” to three superb Holocaust fictions with what Theodor Reik, using a phrase from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, designates “the third ear.” “The psychoanalyst,” writes Reik, “has to learn how one mind speaks to another beyond words and in silence. He must learn to listen ‘with the third ear.’ It is not true that you have to shout to make yourself understood. When you wish to be heard, you whisper” (1949, 144). My intention in the three readings in this section is to listen to what these texts “whisper” outside the margins and between the lines. I read them through a psychoanalytical third ear in order to understand them not only more fully but, finally, more compassionately and, hopefully, with a significant degree of self-consciousness as well. “A little more or a little less sincerity,” writes Reik, “a small plus or minus of moral courage, is what decides whether we understand ourselves and others” (59–60). In other words, sometimes we need a bit more bravery and a little less bravado in order to read texts. What prompts Reik’s observation is his realization that in interpreting one of his own dreams he had omitted a significant aspect of the context: anti-Semitism. What this leads to for Reik is a discussion of Jews (like himself) who are ashamed of being Jewish. “Not analysis, but the analyst,” writes Reik, “makes us understand the meanings of those puzzling processes of the unconscious,” and for Reik part and parcel of this process is interrogating one’s own interior consciousness, including one’s responses to other people’s words (67, 146–47). I apply this paradigm of reading with a multiply attuned third ear (or eye) to the relationship between the reader and the text. It is often through the reader’s interrogation of his own subject position in relation to the text that the reader can unravel the text’s deepest and most significant meanings.

I have described the features of psychoanalytic listening that I apply to the reading of literary fictions in my book coauthored with Rami Aronzon in 2008. They can be summarized as follows:

1. Listening psychoanalytically means listening for the surplus in a narrative, for the “what else” of the story, which is to say for both its unconscious as well as its conscious contents and structures. A work of art contains highly crafted conscious contents and structures. Those do not, however, preclude features of the unconscious.

2. Listening psychoanalytically means listening neutrally, nonjudgmentally, and nondefensively. This means neither approving nor disapproving nor even supporting the teller of the story. Shoshana Feldman and Dori Laub (1992) have argued that our job as readers (or listeners) of people’s narratives is to witness them. That means we must support the storyteller in the details of the story, whether we find them credible or not. It may be the case that when we listen to Holocaust testimonies or read them as memoirs or diaries, it is incumbent upon us not to assume a psychoanalytic stance in relation to the material presented. After all, most of us are not professional psychotherapists. Furthermore, most oral testimony given by Holocaust survivors is not being told to us for the purposes of our psychoanalytic insights. This is precisely the situation of the father, Vladek, in relation to his son in Art Spiegelman’s Maus. But a fictional text is not oral testimony, and fictional characters are certainly not endangered by our forays into a psychoanalytic response to the material presented. What we can say about the text Maus is quite different from what we can say about the survivor Vladek’s story or, for that matter, about his son’s narrative of his reception of that story. Listening nondefensively also means not permitting ourselves to react to what we might find offensive in the text, as, for example (especially if we are Jewish readers), the auto-anti-Semitism of a protagonist such as Rosa in Ozick’s The Shawl.

3. Psychoanalytical listening assumes there is always more story to be told. This means there is also always more listening to be done. Analysis is never over, and in the process of its being heard and heard again and returned to the client for her own self-listening, the story is itself always in the process of dynamic change. This means that, in relation to our reading of literary texts, our analysis of the text, fed back into our reading of that text, will also produce a new text in its wake. We can never factor out either the endless meaningfulness of the text or its self-transformation as it becomes subject to our conscious and unconscious processes. The reader is responsible for her interpretation of and relationship to the text, and she must assume that responsibility.

4. Psychoanalytic listening proceeds on the assumption that a story told to another is also, even primarily, a story told to the self—a story, to recur to Reik’s language, told in whispers. To listen psychoanalytically, then, is often less to hear than to overhear a story. For this reason the purpose of psychoanalytic listening is not to interpret for the patient, but to give the story back to the narrator in such a way that the storyteller can interpret for himself.

5. This idea of returning the story to the teller, when the teller is a written narrative, means not preempting the text’s rights to its own insights. We need to credit the text with a degree of self-knowledge that we are merely helping to assist into greater clarity.

6. Finally, listening psychoanalytically means also listening to our own responses, to our own unconscious processes and materials, which very often are the triggers for our interpretations of other people’s stories. I do not want to fall back on the definition of literary texts as providing some sort of “as-if” life training for the reader, although this is probably as good a definition as any of what fiction is and how it works.

Whatever other benefits listening to Holocaust fictions with a third ear might provide, however, one way that it functions, which my readings are intended to highlight, is how the text’s psychoanalytic processes become an avenue into witnessing the reader’s own unconscious wishes, fears, fantasies, and desires. Listening psychoanalytically to Holocaust fictions might help us to identify what in us resists hearing certain things in Holocaust narratives and what that says about who we are and what needs to change in us so that we can more fully and deeply comprehend other people’s tales of suffering. Part of what Holocaust fiction can serve to help us develop is our fullest capacity for the sympathetic—nonjudgmental, undefended, and non-self-referential—listening to other people’s stories. Those might be aspects of reading that we might want to bring to any literary text. They are essential in relation to Holocaust fiction, where our relationship to fictive stories ultimately helps configure our relationship to history as well.

1 Voyeurism, Complicated Mourning, and the Fetish

Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl

BY THE TIME we meet Rosa Lublin in the second part of Cynthia Ozick’s novella The Shawl (1990), she is “a madwoman and a scavenger.” She has given up her store in New York (“she smashed it up herself”) and moved to Miami (113). A Holocaust survivor and a refugee in America, Rosa destroys her store because, as she puts it, “whoever came, they were like deaf people. Whatever you explained to them, they didn’t understand” (27). This is the assumption she also makes about the man to whom she is now explaining these things. “Whatever I would say,” she says to Simon Persky, “you would be deaf” (27). The “you” reaches disturbingly out of the text and speaks to us, the readers, as well. How we might not remain deaf to Rosa’s story is part of the challenge the story issues to its readers. Yet to hear Rosa’s story in all of its complexity and detail, we must listen in a special sort of way. In order to hear the story, not only as Rosa gives it to us in factual detail but also in its psychological undercurrents, we must listen in a way that even those of us who do listen to Holocaust narratives quite regularly, or at least believe ourselves to be listening, may need to learn. This may mean we might also have to unlearn certain aspects of our regular listening or, to bring this back to the realm of literary, reading practices. It might also mean hearing a story that Rosa herself does not fully intend to tell us.

The Dysfunctional Narrator

Ozick’s Shawl proceeds in two parts. The first part, the short story titled “The Shawl,” is a lyrical, almost poetic account of a forced march, which delivers the major protagonist, Rosa Lublin; her baby daughter, Magda; and her niece, Stella, to a labor camp, where Magda ultimately dies. The second part “Rosa” is a longer, more realistic narrative. It concerns the very bitter and dysfunctional Rosa after the war and after she has relocated to Florida and become a recluse. Rosa’s only meaningful relationship is with her dead child, whom she treats as if she were alive, until she meets Simon Persky and begins to enter into a relationship with him. The novella in its entirety has something important to tell us not only about the degradation suffered by survivors like Rosa both during and after the war but also about the world’s reluctance to hear such survivor stories—or to hear them fully. For, ironically, and more importantly, however much the book has something to say about the world’s unwillingness to hear the story of the Holocaust, it also has something to offer about the opposite phenomenon: our often too avid interest in the events of the Holocaust and the ways we hear those events according to preconceived notions about what happened and to whom.

What is clear from the beginning of The Shawl is that unlike the protagonists in other Holocaust narratives (for example, Vladek in Maus or Hannalore in The Far Euphrates), Rosa does want someone to hear her story of devastation and loss, or at least to hear the part of the story she wants to tell. But no one will listen. Or, more precisely, no one will listen in a way Rosa considers as listening. There is someone in the story, aside from Simon Persky later on, who is willing, even eager, to hear Rosa’s story. That someone is Dr. Tree, a Holocaust scholar of sorts, who is actively soliciting Rosa’s participation in his scientific study of survivors. As someone who is so interested in hearing stories of the Holocaust that he seeks them out, Dr. Tree is discomfortingly like us, the readers of Ozick’s text, since anyone who picks up Ozick’s book to read it is, by definition, not representative of that part of the population who refuses to hear Rosa’s story. Dr. Tree, we are told, has “lately begun to amass survivor data.” It is for this reason that he would like to conduct “an in-depth interview” with Rosa. “Though I am not myself a physician,” Tree explains, “I am presently working on a study . . . designed to research the theory . . . known generally as Repressed Animation. Without at this stage going into detail, it may be of some preliminary use to you to know that investigations so far reveal an astonishing generalized minimalization during any extended period of stress resulting from incarceration, exposure, and malnutrition” (1990, 36). The consequence of this minimalization, according to Dr. Tree, is a state of “non-attachment,” of “consummated indifference”: “they gave up craving and began to function in terms of non-functioning” (36–38). Dr. Tree gives us a definition that recalls the Mussulman, the camp inmate on the verge of death, who has given up the will to live and whose zombie-like qualities are picked up in many a Holocaust novel and critical essay.

Since by most conventional standards (including her own) Rosa is “mad,” Tree’s diagnosis cannot be dismissed out of hand. This is not in the least to diminish the force of Rosa’s objection to participating in Tree’s study: “Disease, disease! . . . An excitement over other people’s suffering. They let their mouths water up. Stories about children running blood in America from sores, what muck” (36). There is something moderately distasteful in the public interest in the Holocaust, especially in relation to the shame, humiliation, and, finally, psychological distress of the “survivors.” “Whatever stains in the crotch are nobody’s business,” Rosa quite rightly admonishes not only the characters in the text but us, too, for we would miss the thrust of Rosa’s ire were we to exclude ourselves from her accusation (34).

There are survivors, like Rosa, who need to be heard in very personal, affective, and nonhistorical ways, precisely as we might hear someone in a psychoanalytic situation. In other words, some people, like Rosa, need to be heard from within the sheer madness of their storytelling by listeners (like Persky or like us) who are willing to entertain madness as a legitimate mode of narrative expression, even if, or especially because, it does nothing less than drag us into its madness. To be sure, this madness (the storyteller’s and finally our own) threatens to dissolve the story’s relationship to historical fact and documentation. It threatens to virtually disqualify the narrative as testimony altogether. And this is the bind: a Holocaust narrative that causes us to question its historical bases is anathema, no less to the teller than to us. Yet for us to hear Holocaust narratives as if they were strictly historical accounts flattens and distorts them in equally problematic ways. Some survivors do suffer from what Tree is calling “Repressed Animation,” “generalized minimalization,” “non-attachment,” and “consummate indifference.” These may be crude, reductive, and perhaps even non-illuminating ways of defining what ails Rosa. Yet some survivors (Rosa among them) do suffer from neurotic and psychotic symptoms. We need to be able to hear their stories not in spite of their pathologies, but through them and through our own (hopefully less severe) psychopathologies as well.

Rosa’s rather unsympathetic niece, Stella, who “took psychology courses at the New School at night,” has other, more familiar-sounding, perhaps less off-putting names than Tree’s for Rosa’s condition: “fetish” and “trauma” (31). But “psychoanalysis” (29) is clearly under scrutiny, if not outright attack, in Ozick’s text along with Holocaust studies in general. Nonetheless, just as we would be overreacting were we to chuck the enterprise of Holocaust studies because it can become too subjective and even prurient, so too psychoanalysis may have something to contribute to our understanding of Holocaust narratives. Even more important, perhaps, psychoanalysis might provide a vocabulary and a technology for our effectively listening to and responding to survivor stories like Rosa’s. As everyone, including Rosa, is agreed, Rosa is “crazy.” How else can we explain her attachment to her dead daughter’s shawl (which is basically a fetish [31]), or her narrowing down the range of her relationships to letters and phone calls with that daughter and her niece, Stella (whom she despises; is this not something we might label generalized minimalization or nonattachment?), or how she animates the dead child’s spirit, making her come alive again? The psychoanalytic name for this, to add to an already overlong list, is “complicated mourning.”

“Complicated mourning,” as described by Vamik D. Volkan in Linking Objects and Linking Phenomena (1981), involves the internalization (introjection) of the lost loved object. Incapable of mourning so as to get through the mourning process and back to life again, the mourner attempts through various means to keep the dead person alive. Therefore, the deceased person remains a living entity within the mourner. Such a diagnosis of Rosa’s situation will no more surprise or disturb readers of the novella who are interested in such psychoanalytic terms of description than the previously mentioned terms like “trauma,” “fetish,” or the “transitional object” (as discussed by Andrew Gordon [1994]), which in terms of complicated mourning might be called a “linking object.” Indeed “linking objects,” “fetishism,” and “complicated mourning” collectively name parts of a single psychological condition. Yet the question remains of what value these psychoanalytic terms might be for us in reading—which is to say in listening to—Rosa’s (and Ozick’s) story. These psychoanalytic categories are not only vital to our interpreting Rosa’s story; they are also pertinent to how we understand our own relation to the text.

We have come a long way in psychoanalytic literary criticism from the old Freudianism, in which texts were read as allegories of pathological conditions pertaining to either the characters or the author. Psychoanalytic categories are no longer assumed to be the objective facts of which literary texts are merely the fictional illustrations. Yet psychoanalysis does offer certain assistance in interpreting the literary text. Of course, Rosa is a fictional character, and whatever she says or thinks or does is being constructed by Ozick, whose mind is not Rosa’s. We might just want to dismiss the complexities of Rosa’s ambiguities and ambivalences for the depths of clarity of Ozick’s literary purposes. Even if writers may be assumed to create fiction out of the unconscious as well as conscious components of their own minds, those conscious components are there in abundance. Writers cognitively, intellectually determine much about the final product we call the story, and without a doubt The Shawl is a highly crafted work of fiction. It deploys several literary strategies for making ethical and even ideological points about the Holocaust and about Jewish identity before, after, and during the events, although we also need to see that ideology bears with it its own deeply unconscious motivations.

Ozick is not Rosa. Yet if a writer is a great writer—and I think Ozick is such a writer—then, as Freud claimed long ago in “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (1978a; originally published 1908), she articulates archaic fantasies, which inhabit all of us. The “essential ars poetica,” of the creative writer, says Freud, “lies in the technique of overcoming the feeling of repulsion in us which is undoubtedly connected with the barriers that rise between each single ego and the others. . . . The writer softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by altering and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal—that is, aesthetic—yield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies” (153; italics in original). Located in Rosa—whose name is a translation into English of Ozick’s Hebrew name, Shoshanah—there clearly is a part of Ozick’s own psyche functioning as if Ozick had had the horrific experiences of this woman, whom she so devotedly produces for us on the page: her own world of paper and pen, in its small stillness, so like Rosa’s, as Rosa writes letter after letter to her dead daughter. Ozick’s gift as a writer is her ability to put herself into this other consciousness in the condition of as if. It is her talent to let this consciousness speak to us of its pain and torment and even of its less savory fantasies, unfettered by the processes of intellect that generally defend us against such unguarded expressions of self. There is a depth to Rosa’s madness that demands to be read, precisely because Ozick’s great talent has constructed it for us to explore.

It is in terms of plumbing the depths of Rosa’s story that the psychoanalytic model has something special to offer. We may be able to understand The Shawl without access to terms like “fetish,” “transitional [linking] object,” “trauma,” or “complicated mourning,” but these words are at least no worse than others we might use to try to describe Rosa’s situation. Insofar as understanding Rosa or people like her has something to do with being able to comprehend what they are suffering, the terms have value. But the psychoanalytic model has something more to offer. This is its insistence that listening is an ongoing process that is never exhausted. Even more crucially, such listening never exhausts the narrative that it is hearing. Or, more precisely, it never exhausts the narrative it is overhearing, because, as I have already noted, psychoanalytic thinking also attends to the way a story told to another person might nonetheless be primarily a story told to the self. Of this story we are merely eavesdroppers. We as much listen in on these stories as we listen to them. This also mea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Prologue: Ghostwriting the Holocaust: The Ghost Writer, The Diary, The Kindly Ones, and Me
• Section I. Psychoanalytic Listening and Fictions of the Holocaust
• Section II. Golems, Ghosts, Idols, and Messiahs: Complicated Mourning and the Intertextual Construction of a Jewish Symptom
• Section III. Mourning Becomes the Nations: Styron, Schlink, Sebald
• Epilogue: Holocaust, Apartheid, and the Slaughter of Animals: J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and Cora Diamond’s “Difficulty of Reality”
• Bibliography
• Index