Inside the 'Shoah': Narrative, Documentation, and Schwarz-Bart's 'The Last of the Just.'
Journal article by Neil R. Davison; CLIO, Vol. 24, 1995
Journal Article Excerpt
Inside the 'Shoah': narrative, documentation, and Schwarz-Bart's 'The Last of the Just.' by Neil R. Davison One can produce an imaginary discourse about real events that may not be less "true" for being imaginary. It all depends upon how one construes the function of the faculty of imagination in human nature. Hayden White, The Content of the Form Toward the middle of his now somewhat forgotten work, Le dernier de Justes (1959, translated as The Last of the Just, 1960), Andre Schwarz-Bart pushes the plight of his protagonist, Ernie Levy, into a "documentary" context of representation of the Shoah(1): Although its origin would always remain mysterious, in time the act of aggression against Ernie took its place in the series of anti-Semitic acts that announced Adolf Hitler's rise to power. Communists being scarce in Stillenstadt and democrats being altogether lacking, it followed naturally that the local section of the Nazi Party directed the full fire of its propaganda against the few Jewish families that were "rife" in the town. After Adolf Hitler's accession to the supreme office of Chancellor of the Reich, German Jews felt trapped, like rats condemned to run in circles while waiting for the worst. "We should never have left Poland," Mother Judith admitted one day. "I ask forgiveness. It was my fault, mine. . . ." "Come, come," the patriarch answered her gently. "If evil is everywhere, how can you hope to escape it?" It was the year 1933 after the coming of Jesus, the beautiful herald of impossible love.(2) Using the novel's previously established narrative technique, the passage offers Ernie's persecution as an unrecorded aspect of the actual S.A. and Nazi pogroms that raged throughout Germany prior to and after 1933. Yet Schwarz-Bart also employs the overtly literary simile of "Jews as rats," ironically a central trope of Nazi discourse about the spread of "the Jewish disease," which in turn was a scientized/racialized version of a century-old European cultural assumption about Jewish accursedness. Blending documented fact, fictive material, and metaphor, the passage aligns Nazism with European Christian Judeophobia and in doing so offers its own type of narrative "history." As I will argue in the following pages, however, Schwarz-Bart's novel ultimately implies a great deal more concerning the impact of fictional works on our historiography of the Shoah. The above scene, moreover, which indeed can stand as a synecdoche for Schwarz-Bart's entire novel, sits at the center of a debate surrounding "the unique historical nature" of the Shoah.(3) One side of the well-established argument asserts that the Nazi horror effectually revealed the specious falsity of Enlightenment humanistic progress, regardless of whether we view Auschwitz as nightmarish or through Arendt's banality. Holocaust representation in either fiction or narrative history thus becomes dangerously misleading, insofar as both genres obscure the event as "merely another part of modern history," when the Shoah is rather the end of "history" as the West has constructed it for the last three hundred years. The opposing argument posits that the Shoah, like other modern catastrophic occurrences, was the failure of Enlightenment principles, not their demise, and must live and become significant, as in other histories, through representation.(4) Although the controversy reached its peak in academia in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it has recently been recycled in a popular version as a result of Stephen Spielberg's film, Schindler's List (1994). Through his reinterpretation of a singular narrative within the larger world of the Shoah, Spielberg managed briefly to place the era back into mainstream American consciousness. Subsequently, academics, journalists, and gadflies have aligned themselves on either side of the documentary-versus-dramatization argument over the film.(5) Such voices, however, are obscuring once again the necessary tension produced from differing types of representation of the Shoah, the spectrum of which becomes pivotal to our political, narratological, and historiographical attempts to make meaning of those occurrences.The dialectical complexity created from testimony, historical, and fictional narratives indeed allows us to further unravel some of the more threadbare categorical differences between history and fiction. As James Young explains, this leap becomes crucial to our grasp of the Shoah because "history never unfolds independently of the ways we have understood it; and in the case of the Holocaust, the interpretation and structural organization of historical events as they occurred may ultimately have determined the horrific course they eventually took."(6) Narrative always determines history, both in the present and retrospectively, and of course depends on both historical and literary form. Through the study of interpretation, Young argues, we ... |
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