Novel Thoughts

While I've read a number of novels since In Search of Lost Time, I probably won't get around to writing much about them. But that doesn't mean I don't have anything to say about any of them, however brief or truncated. Here are notes on some of them; other novels have their own posts.

Molloy, Malone Dies, & The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett:
Gabriel Josipovici has written in a few places about how, as a young man feeling urgently the need to write, he felt overwhelmed by the examples set by such writers as Tolstoy, Conrad, Dickens, George Eliot. Their works seemed complete, hermetically sealed, sure of themselves. It was writers like Proust and T.S. Eliot who helped show him the way out of his problem, with their inclusion of, awareness of, failure in their work. Beckett, too, of course. "Fail better", and so on. I've felt a twinge of recognition in reading Josipovici's words. As I've said here before, my problem was even more acute: I refused to even acknowledge the need to speak. There were however times when words would occur to me, formal ideas perhaps, and I'd immediately discount them as invalid. Which brings me to Beckett's prose trilogy. I actually read these before finishing Proust. Where I'd previously said that I didn't want to read any other fiction till I'd finished In Search of Lost Time, I found myself bogged down, unable to get started with the fifth volume, The Captive. With none of my available non-fiction doing it for me either, I opted for Beckett. It was just what I needed: I quickly read Molloy and Malone Dies, though The Unnamable was somewhat slower going, as might be expected. I feel a great affinity with his writing, in a way that's hard to describe, so I won't try to cram it in here. But there's something familiar here, a recognition. I'll be reading a lot of Beckett in the coming years.

Bartleby & Co. and Montano's Malady by Enrique Vila-Matas (both translated by Jonathan Dunne): It's uncanny: here is a writer seemingly addressing the very things I've been thinking about, perhaps without my always knowing it, though certainly the correspondence with what have been ongoing concerns here is obvious. Lars is right, of course, there are no models. But it was nice, semi-inspiring even, to come across such assemblages of writers confronting these similar types of problems. Writers of No; refusals; the sickness of literature, literature as sickness. I must, however, admit that my attention flagged while reading both, and the second was in particular a slog for me to finish. Almost as if he'd made his point, and I grew increasingly weary of the elaboration (though no doubt he needed to see his conception through, and can I blame him?).

To the Lighthouse and Orlando by Virginia Woolf:
Ten months into the year, and I've only read two books written by women? Wow. Woolf was long one of those writers, like Joyce, who represented for my imagination "difficulty" in literary Modernism. This, of course, was without reading a word of her writing. Mrs Dalloway changed that slightly, some years ago. These even more so. They were a great pleasure to read, particularly To the Lighthouse. In both, I especially enjoyed the short passages describing the artist's vision and process, one of which I excerpted elsewhere. Other than The Waves, which is already on my to-read list, what else of Woolf's fiction should I read? All of it?

Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee:
I'm with Waggish and Steve on this one. Actually, in this case, I suspect I will have more to say about it. For now let me just say that I'm amazed that readers still insist on assuming that the "opinions" in this book are necessarily held by J.M. Coetzee himself, and that their content have much to do with the success or failure of the book.

The Immortal Bartfuss by Aharon Appelfeld (translated by Jeffrey Green):
This is the first Appelfeld novel I've read that takes place after the Holocaust. I'm sorry to report that I have very little to say about it at this time.

Aharon Appelfeld and historical fact

I read Philip Roth's novel Operation Shylock years before I ever heard of Aharon Appelfeld. Which you could say only goes to show you how much attention I paid to that novel, since Appelfeld makes numerous appearances in it (before he learns of the "other" Philip Roth impersonating him, narrator-Roth's stated reason for going to Israel is to interview the Israeli novelist Appelfeld). In defense of my younger self, when I read the novel I was not nearly as informed as I am today about Israel and Palestine and the United States' role in that land's politics and history, and as for Appelfeld himself, his name simply must not have stuck in my mind, though I remember other aspects of the novel fairly well, all things considered. (I think a re-read is in order.)

Ellis Sharp wrote about Operation Shylock and Appelfeld not too long ago. The real-life Roth is an admirer and champion of Appelfeld. In his post, Ellis quotes for us a passage from Operation Shylock in which the imitation Roth lambasts the "real" Roth:

he had picked up Aharon's Tzili and was showing me how far he’d got in reading it. 'This stuff is real poison,' he said, 'Everything Diasporism fights against. Why do you think highly of this guy when he is the last thing we need? He will never relinquish anti-Semitism. It's the rock he builds his whole world on. Eternal and unshakeable anti-Semitism. The man is irreparably damaged by the Holocaust – why do you want to encourage people to read this fear-ridden stuff?'

This is interesting for a variety of reasons. One of the recurring ideas in Roth's fiction is this battle between "Diasporism" and, not orthodoxy, quite, but let's call it "un-Diasporism". Roth's characters assert, argue, and act out their own Jewishness, and their own humanity, in the face of community and family pressure on what being Jewish should entail, or in the face of responsibility to community needs. In his trip to Israel in Portnoy's Complaint, Portnoy is ridiculed for his Diasporism, whereas in the States, he is constantly aware of his Jewishness in the context of his experience of the WASP-y superculture.

In Appelfeld's fiction, there can be discerned a consistent rebuke to assimilationist Jews. Jews who tried to live within the larger society, who considered themselves German, say, or Austrian, only to have that sensibility mean nothing when the Holocaust rendered everything outside of racial categories null and void, seem perhaps foolish in the full light of history. I think there is a tendency to think that because the Holocaust did happen, that it or something similarly horrible was inevitable, given the centuries of entrenched European anti-Semitism. I think it could be argued that Appelfeld's fiction, undeniably powerful as much of it is (The Age of Wonders is particularly remarkable), in a sense contributes to this line of thinking. For in his fiction, the lives he depicts are doomed, are they not? We know the Holocaust looms, either a few years away, or perhaps decades. We know that their daily struggles will amount to nothing in the face of such an enormous, monstrous historical inevitability. For in the novels, the Holocaust is inevitable: don't they rely on our knowledge of it? And yet, let's be fair: it's not as if any of our daily struggles amount to much. We are all doomed, finally. But, we are not all doomed to succumb to a racialised, historical, group calamity.

A consistent rebuke to assimilationists may be discernible in his fiction, though I don't sense that this is Appelfeld's focus. He is writing about a world, a world that has ceased to exist. This world consists of Jews in various different guises. His Jews are just trying to live their lives the best they can, though no doubt they are often shown at their worst. Some are assimilated, some are not. Debates, arguments, about Jewishness are common among these Jews, just as they are among those in Roth's fiction. And his fiction, his world, is haunted by the unimaginable destruction that we know as readers is coming.

Ellis thinks of Appelfeld as no more than "at best an interesting minor novelist", but he reserves most of his criticism for the man and his role within the politics and memory of present-day Israel. Of the passage quoted above from Operation Shylock, Ellis says:

as a perception of Appelfeld the man it is stunningly accurate. Appelfeld’s sensibility is lodged deep in a past and in a society which no longer exist. This supplies an exemplary source for his fiction but is disabling when he has to address why the contemporary Zionist state is widely regarded with hostility. Representing the European condition as a seething sea of anti-Semitism is the lazy trope of Zionists not prepared to scrutinise the history of their sectarian state or the priviliges it affords them as members of the master religion. Roth, I think, shrewdly understands this. He sees that there are two Aharon Appelfelds – the novelist, whose work can only ever be judged on its own terms, and the wounded, fallible man.

At least Roth the novelist--the artist--shrewdly understands this point. I've seen some indications in interviews that Roth the man might not be quite as shrewd.

I have not read Appelfeld's very highly regarded memoir, A Story of a Life. The sense I get from some of the notices I've read is that it's not unlike some of his novels, with much passed over in silence. This, I expect, could make for some powerful reading. However, I find Ellis' lengthy piece from last summer on the memoir persuasive on certain key points. The piece is titled "The Blindness of Aharon Appelfeld". The blindness refers to Appelfeld's apparent inability or unwillingness to see the similarities between Nazi treatment of the Jews in Europe, and Israeli treatment of Arabs in Palestine. So saturated in anti-Semitism is Appelfeld (as the Operation Shylock passage has it) that he can't see what is happening right in front of him as he begins his life in what was still called Palestine when he arrived, soon to become Israel. Again, I haven't read the memoir, so I can't comment on it directly. But the problem Ellis identifies with it and Appelfeld's attitude about being a Jewish writer living in Jerusalem, is still all too common among Anglo-American liberals and leftists (not to mention others). Even though Israel's prestige has lessened considerably in recent years, liberals and leftists are still sensitive to the charge of anti-Semitism (a charge often carelessly made) and it's still common for Israel to be seen as a righteous cause (and as a bulwark of modernity in a sea of primitive fundamentalism), in the face of all facts or reasonable moral argument to the contrary.

In his piece, Ellis provides various passages from A Story of a Life, juxtaposing them with certain passed over historical facts about what was happening to the Arabs at the same time. Appelfeld, Ellis writes,

has never shown the slightest interest in any other perspective about his homeland other than that of Judaism. And where exactly was Appelfeld during the height of the Naqba [the catastrophe]? He doesn’t say. Palestinian suffering has no existence for Appelfeld: his gaze is inward. "The years 1946 to 1950 were years of verbiage; when life is full of ideology, words and clichés abound. Everyone talked."

Ellis rightly points out that the years 1946 to 1950 were full of much more than words, but were in fact the years of mass, forcible dispossession of the Palestinians. But surely a memoirist, one who is not a political figure, is entitled to the inward gaze? Perhaps. However, Ellis is particularly compelling, I think, as he explains why this is a problem:

Appelfeld says, “We had come to Israel, as the saying went, ‘to build and to be rebuilt.’ (p. 116) That the building of the Jewish state was done on stolen property is a matter of complete indifference to Appelfeld: he completely erases Palestine and its indigenous population from his self-serving memoir. [. . .]

No one in the West would use the word "holocaust" without an awareness that that word now carries a specific historical resonance. But Appelfeld uses the word "catastrophe" (e.g. pp. 185, 187, 189) as if it had no resonance at all in the land in which he has spent most of his life. The Story of a Life is, at a foundational level, a work of Naqba denial.

[For an interesting article about the Naqba and Naqba denial, see here.]

Interestingly, Appelfeld's fiction relies on our knowledge of certain historical facts. And, it hardly needs to be said, the Holocaust is a huge one, hard to ignore or forget (even as there are those who choose to deny it). Yet, it seems that some of the effectiveness of Appelfeld's memoir ironically relies on the reader not knowing, or ignoring, certain facts, whether Appelfeld intends it or not. And the facts of the dispossession of the Palestinians and the imposition of the state of Israel are, unfortunately, not widely known. Indeed, in the West, huge amounts of counter-facts are held to be true. If Appelfeld's memoir resembles Ellis' account of it, and he has given me little to reason to think that it doesn't, then I think his memoir, as distinct from his fiction, is problematic. His fiction depicts, often powerfully, the lost world of European Jewry. Readers could quibble about the factual basis for some of these depictions if they wanted, I suppose, but finally they are works of the imagination, rooted in history and haunted by a single, brute, ugly fact--the fact of the Holocaust--a fact that cannot be quibbled with or denied. And yet we continually deny or ignore other monstrous facts.

A generalization to close this post: I tend to approach memoirs more or less the same way I approach novels, in the sense that they are literary creations of a time and place, in their cases explicitly from the writer's life. I don't expect the writer's memory to be flawless, and I'm not overly bothered by some degree of factual embellishment or artful shaping of the story being told. However, there are facts that are larger than the author, and with these I expect more care.

A further generalization intended to point toward future considerations of literature and its relation to life: The same is true of fiction.

But, some complicating questions: Which facts are larger than the author? I've asserted that, uncontroversially, the Holocaust is one such fact. Ellis Sharp, I think, has convincingly demonstrated that the Naqba is another. Which others? Who decides? How much might it matter in each given case?

Notes on Aharon Appelfeld

Is it possible to read an Aharon Appelfeld novel without being at all times conscious of the shadow of the Holocaust hanging over the narrative?

The first Appelfeld novel I read, a couple years back, was The Age of Wonders. It had been brought to my attention as "the greatest Holocaust novel", a novel in which the Holocaust itself is passed over in silence. The first half focuses on a family of assimilated Austrian Jews. My memory of the details isn't clear, but I remember petty family squabbles, arguments about what the Jews should be. I remember the narrator's father, an intellectual, a writer, refusing to admit what is happening in Austria. I remember train rides to a family retreat, before the final train ride ending this section: "By the next day we were on the cattle train hurtling south." In the second section, "Many Years Later When Everything Was Over", the narrator reluctantly returns to Austria, an Austria "now clean of Jews".

Then came Badenheim 1939. Badenheim is a Jewish resort town. Here people are so caught up in their daily trivia that they are completely unable to interpret the meaning of various signals, such as the new laws restricting Jewish activity and movement. The novel ends with the whole town lined up at the train station, bickering and complaining, as they await a certain train to a destination they don't have in mind.

I read some about Appelfeld. Each of his novels that I own includes some variation of the following personal biography:

Aharon Appelfeld was eight when he witnessed the murder of his mother by the Nazis. After escaping from a concentration camp, he wandered in the forests for two years. When the war ended he joined the Soviet Army as a kitchen boy, eventually emigrating to Palestine in 1946.

After reading The Age of Wonders and Badenheim 1939 and some reviews of his work, I had the impression that all of Appelfeld's fiction mined similar temporal terrain: the daily lives of pre-war Jews, the debates about assimilation, the encroaching calamity hanging over everything, opening onto silence.

Last week I took The Retreat down from my shelf and started to read. An aging actress, Lotte, is traveling up a mountain to a retreat (interesting that these novels all feature resorts or retreats of some kind). It is 1937, Austria. Once respected, she has lost her job. Former friends have turned her away. It is a familiar story. She'd sought asylum with her daughter, but it didn't go well; she'd fought with her daughter's Austrian husband. So she decided to leave, to seek refuge at this mountaintop retreat. The retreat itself is run by Balaban, a Jew who years before had taken it as his mission to teach the Jews to shed their Jewishness. Exercises, speech lessons. By the time of the novel, this mission has failed, and the Jews at the retreat are there because they have no place else to go. Most of them are harsh towards Jews as a group, idealizing the Austrians. Lotte, "too, to tell the truth, was drawn to them as if by magic--it was never the Jews who appealed to her heart, only the tall, blond Austrians, in each of whom she imagined she could see an artist." (Yet, at the same time she is aware that the Austrians she has actually known never seemed to live up to this ideal.) Given little other choice--unable to return to their former lives--the residents form a makeshift community in isolation, retreating from the world, holding off disaster as long as they can.

Next: Unto the Soul. I began reading this immediately after finishing The Retreat. Another book, another mountain, another kind of retreat. This time, a holy place, a cemetery of Jewish martyrs, guarded over by Gad and his sister Amalie, after the death of their aged Uncle Arieh. This, too, I read in the shadow of the Holocaust, aware of the calamity to come, looking for clues in the narrative. But they don't really come, not in the same way. It's a different time and place than in the other books (I only read the back of the book later, which tells me it's "turn of the century Eastern Europe"). But the world on the plain is nearly as inhospitable. Periodic pogroms. Typhus epidemics. Gad and Amalie, also in isolation on the mountain, stave off madness and harsh weather. The weather, in a sense, protects them from the world away from the mountaintop, but they are unable to escape their own thoughts, or their commitment to the cemetery.

Appelfeld's ongoing subject is, essentially, the lost world of the European Jews. A world that could not be saved, no matter what people did. The question at the beginning of this post was prompted by my reading of Unto the Soul. For, even in his fiction that depicts an earlier period, still the Holocaust looms in the distance. In his other novels, the jacket descriptions make it abundantly clear that the Jews in the novels are living in a world soon to be destroyed. Here, that destruction is further off. In each of his books, Appelfeld focuses on mundane life. Daily chores, routines, repetition, arguments. In Unto the Soul, we are repeatedly told of Gad milking the cow or sawing wood, as if they were sacraments, which in a sense they are. If these tasks don't get done, they will not have food or heat, the place will fall into disrepair, pilgrims will stop coming, they will die. In the other novels, the daily activity never ceases, even in the face of the oncoming horror, which none of the characters could possibly imagine.