Journal Article

Responding to the Effect of the Holocaust in the Present: A Comparison of Narrative Strategies in Time's Arrow, A Blessing on the Moon and The Reader

Jørgensen, Nina H B

2015

Overview

Michael is ill with hepatitis which causes one to turn yellow, like the yellow star worn by the Jews. [...]post-war Germany is sick and needs to address its Nazi past in order to recover.14 The book is '[w]ritten in a style of icy clarity that simultaneously reveals and conceals'.15 Like Tod, Hanna holds a secret. Elie Wiesel's Night is a classic example.19 Wiesel was protective over his authority to transform his experience into knowledge.20 Similarly, in If This Is A Man, Primo Levi wrote an account of his own experiences at Auschwitz where he 'became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man.'21 Levi's aim was nevertheless to promote understanding of the death camps as a 'sinister alarm-signal' and to 'furnish documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind.'22 The first generation factual accounts have become resources for the second and third generation imaginative accounts, aimed at understanding our modern day reaction to the Holocaust. Amis acknowledges his debt to Levi, from whom he borrows his alternative title, The Nature of the Offence.23 The narrator in A Blessing is named after the author's grandfather and the book, apart from claiming a commemorative function, demonstrates 'that in the post-Holocaust era, as more descendants of survivors grow up, the silenced voice returns in a new form.'24 By writing from the perspective of the dead, Skibell responds to Levi's observation that only the dead are true witnesses.25 In The Reader, the narrator is himself the second generation, directly taking on the complex issue of a nation coming to terms with its past.26 Michael comments: 'Whatever validity the concept of collective guilt may or may not have, morally and legally-for my generation of students it was a lived reality.'27 Nonetheless, today's writers who take up the subject of the Holocaust are not 'unfettered in their creation' as 'concerns for truthfulness and authenticity' linger.28 It has been argued that German literature about the Holocaust entails special limitations because 'the German novelist, playwright or poet-no matter how remote-is still identified with the perpetrators of atrocities', raising the question of the right to identify with the victims.29 This may have constrained Schlink, although it is doubtful that Auschwitz means a German writer today 'cannot mourn over the ruins of Dresden'.30 None of the three selected works appears to upset the delicate balance of preserving the inherently unknowable nature of the Holocaust while probing its modern-day presence and persistence as an inspiration for fiction. Each of the three novels has a degree of 'uncertainty, paralysis, and ambivalence' but this may be preferable to a narrative 'controlled by a tangible voice committed to the traditional transmutation of suffering into beauty and chaos into tragic significance.'55 The three selected works are in a sense 'unaccommodating to the reader', yet have the potential to convey more successfully 'the disruption and unease that the subject demands than the more seamless, aesthetically pleasing work'.56 When Michael observes the trial in The Reader he comments on the 'numbness' described in survivor literature 'in which life's functions are reduced to a minimum [...] and gassing and burning are everyday occurrences.'57 He finds that this numbness grips everyone 'who had to deal with these events now'.58 Literature offers an escape from the numbness, 'an imaginative access to past events'.59 The Holocaust continues to capture writers' imagination as evident in more recent novels, such as The Kindly Ones60 and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.61 The challenge today may be less one of achieving historical authenticity than in captivating readers when media images of conflict and atrocity are inescapable.

• Publisher: War, Literature, & the Arts
• Subject: Amis, Martin